When Beginning to Fall Apart

Subhransu Maitra

When you are aging and beginning to fall apart,   

the onset of decrepitude drives your raptor mind 

wild with rage.  

Fury at decay strikes a shrieking jagged note in your gloomy songs. 

But often the onset makes music of a different, mellower kind.  

Quietly it nudges you to examine  

like a sculptor or painter at work– 

to touch, even fondle the deep creases

and furrows in your wizened face 

and the baldness,  

the shriveled skin, thin shrinking arms and legs—

the once robust combustible tumescence-prone erogenous parts  

                                      under the abdominal region, 

now withering desiccated holes for waste ejection—  

fondle and contemplate-not without a flicker of sad exultation– 

how these dear-achieved limbs  

(Perfected through numerous births and deaths),  

when full-blooded and strong in youth  

could catch fire at the touch of kindred limbs  

and make music in the delight of bodily union  

enacting the raptures of love, joy and passion  

and achieving a frail harmony.   

What remains after this?  

Darkness, wisdom or ancient rapture?                

 

The hermit Maha-Tissa, Buddha’s disciple  

had an answer. When he was accosted  

on the way by a young woman who  

flashed at him a radiant smile  

and her dainty teeth, the sage thought  

he saw neither youth, nor grace,  

nor the power and glory of flesh and blood buckled together,  

but a skeleton of bones.   

But the poets on the other hand-  

Jibanananda Das and W.B. Yeats  

would have seen neither decay nor transience. 

They’d have loathed the skeleton and fixed 

their attention on youth and love  

and the triumph of flesh and blood  

over politics and the rest of the quotidian comedy.  

 

I find myself fastened to all this.  

And though not a quiver in the face betrays the conflict within,  

will my Karma, the implacable, impervious master  

have the last word and sing me  

into an unageing void of freedom                               

where there is no tumult, cloud or rain,  

but only the breathless serenity of a somnolent tropic noon?

 

Kolkata

(May 2022)