Joseph Mallord William Turner
Incarnation of the Now
My inability to express myself / is astounding.
—Mary Ruefle
Before I was born, I made a pact with fishes. When I saw my mother
& father through my navel, I radiated entropy. To doodle self-portraits
with graphite is to stop recognizing a mirror, or carrots & apricots.
Things can be endlessly reduced, like the half-life of an element
whose isotopes have not been discovered yet. Turn a novel into
a story, the story into a poem, & the poem into a haiku, says a poet
living in Vermont who has finally learnt to love a dog on her own:
Carbon into nitrogen. Fermium into palladium. Sugar to caramel.
The difference between symptoms (vicinity) and an asymptote
(infinity) is a letter (affinity). As I begin to lose my sharpness to
shapeliness, I figure I know nothing about the black hole, which
is really a fist. When I saw you—I spelled viscosity with my
hands. I too detest exactness so much so that I leave a book
out in the weather & watch it wither in the winter.
Tuhin’s poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in Poetry City, Bacopa Literary Review, Nether Quarterly, RIC Journal, Narrow Road Journal, and elsewhere. He currently serves as a Poetry Editor at Bengaluru Review, Sonic Boom Journal, and Yavanika Press. Tuhin tweets poems @secondhandsins