Story of a Night
My feet walked the corridor
endlessly, moving towards
the room, moving away.
The night shifted, hour by hour,
the rains increased, the nearby houses
standing like witnesses to a distant fear.
A long time later, I stepped inside the room,
where she sat on my bed. Blue, transparent,
her body flowing inside her like sea water.
I walked nearer, quietly sat beside her.
She was looking into me as if
I couldn’t be anyone but herself.
Quietly, I curled my arm around her,
throughout imagining the many ways
to hold an absence. Fear was so near!
And suddenly, the words, “I feel so afraid!”
I had hardly heard them before something
twisted around me like a lover.
I carried her to the adjoining room where we lay
on a safer bed, each folded around the other like
leaf and bud. The night and the rains were there.
