Marginal Annotations and Other Poems

"What the mind forgets
the scars keep on remembering."

"What the mind forgets
the scars keep on remembering."

"From the air-conditioned window
We know the summer heat
Only by the scorched gross in the meadow;
And we see the day ending
Not by a glaring sun's slow sinking,
But more by its bonfire-red;
And we have seen the sea's perfect smoothness
Only when the wind crumpled
the wide creaseless spread
To ripple and foam.
Things by themselves are seldom and complete.

Sometimes they stalk the consciousness
Trailing old scenes from a childhood home.
Walking the small path through the coconut tress,
- palms overhead, light- and shade-dappled,
Hand cupped about the rough-skinned roundness
of a santol,
Pink tambis, mango, lanzones-
Drenched in the mist of recall.

Somehow things are made real
in themselves by something integral
Or something added by design or by accident
Like some invisible sage
Leaving his lean marginal comment
On the cosmic page.