The Lost Poem

In the sussurating session
of silent meditation
where the angel wings of desire
of a hundred aspiring yogis
flap in concentrated,
intentional indifference,
my lost poem haunts me.

The words are gone
the well-worked
mosaic of metaphors
of alliteration,
the delights of iteration,
and internal and external rhyme;
Only the meaning that lurked
under every line
has left behind
purports prosaic.

I looked through all the notebooks,
followed all the blogs and every mail,
to no avail.
I really wish I could find that poem.
It was written out of
deep love for you.

And here John Donne
scratches at love
and separation and the mind,
the very things that were
on my poem's mind.

But here he talks of fantasy,
while I explored reality.

It was an ocean metaphor
about waves of vyabhicharis
and sthayis being deep,
where the particulars of rasa
the phenomenology of who we are,
merge into Radha Krishna,
and that is where we meet.

It was about how we,
pearl plungers diving the depths,
know distance only on this sea's skin,
and meeting, physical or in flight
comes only with our inner sight.

We intersect
where Radha and Krishna intersect,
at the vanishing point.

Was there more or is that all?
Was all this in the original?
My lost poem sparks
the thought: in the ocean of rasa
we must become sharks.

Silence

Here they say silence
is the closest thing to God.

I heard this one yesterday:
"If Krishna is Brahma, then Radha is silence."
I thought about it a bit and decided
there is some logic to it.

But where you are concerned,
your silence means an absence, not a presence.

Only in that convoluted Buddhist way of thinking,
where the negative is a logical category
like mathematical zero,
and therefore has a sort of existence,
can it be thought of otherwise.

We have heard of Vaishnavas who,
in their obsession with separation,
and with presence in absence,
also think of it otherwise.

But this too is a flailing grasp
at mathematically proving something
for which faith and a sense of presence
have been lost.

Your absence is an absence,
no matter how mesmerizing the mirage.
Krishna's absence was an absence for the gopis,
and not a substitute for
being with him,
ever.