I pick up images 
as I walk along the shore of life 
turning them over like seashells 
in my mind, inspecting them
for their colour, shape and patterns. 

This one will do, there is something 
about its texture that tells
a tactile truth, I slip it
into a pocket in my brain, 
storing it for future use,

now this other one here,
let's see…um…
does not quite fit the bill, 
I toss it back onto the sand,
idly hoping some day
some other beach walker
may find it of use.

I search them for the stories 
inscribed on them
by wind, waves and sand,

for the ways they can
jostle with other images,
fit into a mosaic of meaning, 
reorganize rhetoric, 
and forge new patterns of sense 
and local cosmologies of connections, 

for the ways they can
sing aloud in the hubbub 
of horns in the traffic of thought. 

I hold them to my ear.
It's like gathering the sea 
in your soul, aquamarine rush
of fluid forms sifting, 
shifting, lifting the debris 
on its bobbing waves 
wringing music from hard consonants. 

Even if you remove seashells 
from the sea
they still carry 
its surging sound 
in the hollow of their hearts

just as stray images 
that float ìn the mind
resonate with the music
of the larger poem 
where they belong. 
                        

Every time the rains
turned the street outside
the house into a river
the frogs croaked at night
in the ponds nearby,
a grainy, guttural chorus,

unmodulated, like a song
pulled out of its core
by errant tunes chasing
an impossible score
sending that slightest shiver 
down the spine as hoarse hallelujahs 
to a raucous, rural reality
rent the air. 

now the frogs have disappeared,
and with them a host of things,
including the mornings after
which made one seem so silly, 
perfectly ordinary as they were 
in their dry, frogless normalcy.

The house, too, has gone
though it appears in dreams,
in subtle apprehensions
and sudden apparitions

a corridor of connections, 
twilit terraces stretching 
into clairvoyant dawns, 
a hollow opening out of nowhere
like the yawn of idle hours,

old bones snapping,
floorboards creaking, 
concatenation of effects 
in neanderthal niches of memory 

mysterious glow 
of yellow electric bulbs
in dark monsoon mornings
of the overcast heart
and so much more. 

I miss those grainy orchestras 
in the grottos of night 
as ecological epiphanies 
raining their dire warnings
of innumerable vanishings 
darken the horizon.