Canvasser of Dreamscapes: Three poems by Jyotish Chalil Gopinathan
Photo: Karan Madhok
Poetry by Jyotish Chalil Gopinathan: ‘Pressing my ear to the ground / straining to hear / the universe speak. / The faintest tremor / of the butterfly wing’
The Maestro’s Street
For K Satchidanandan
It hides in the very essence
of what you are – chronicler,
canvasser of dreamscapes
erected, imagined –
what makes me want
to tiptoe beside your shadow.
To wrap my clammy palm
around your little finger.
I would trot along
trying to keep pace
with your long strides.
And pretend
not to pay attention
to you,
commanding
sullen clouds into silly submission.
I would watch,
with unbridled glee,
out of the corner of my eye,
the sun breaking through,
twinkling, fading.
While I make do with playing
peekaboo with the fleeing dark.
All this,
in your city street.
Caught swirling
in the milling crowd,
On the pavement
outside your studio door,
The day
that I turned fifty-four.
*
Butterfly Effect
Pressing my ear to the ground
straining to hear
the universe speak.
The faintest tremor
of the butterfly wing—
the tempests that will be launched,
the tsunami unleashed.
I heard nothing.
Except
my heart rush rumbling
inside my head
on the steel rails,
like the freight train arriving
around the tunnel bend.
*
Evaporation
Vacuumed in.
We are coursing
the frenzied bowels
of the sinkhole.
A purging tornado
heaves around.
Sucked out of us,
in an irresistible
centrifugal pull,
in pieces,
are memories,
flayed fragments
of lives lived.
Till all are wrung out.
Till the core shrivels,
flakes begin
to crust.
We would yet, as spindly
threads, evaporate
through the exhaling veils
of earth’s stones.
Through the surface
of the caving cavern.
To a stark sky
that will always
scrape itself
clean.
***
Jyotish Chalil Gopinathan is a nephrologist, postgraduate teacher, and researcher residing in Kozhikode, Kerala, India. His 2024 poetry collection The Coppiced House was published by Writers Workshop Kolkata. His poems have appeared in journals including Muse India, Madras Courier, Poems India, The Punch Magazine, Annals of Internal Medicine, Ethos Literary Journal and Borderless Journal. You can find him on Instagram: @jyotchalgop.
