Filming Amnesia in Monochrome
For flocks of birds are released in the church, from the Virgin’s womb. For a woman with a sacred composure in her frame, stands behind a screen of poplars.
For the veil unfolds:
a blanched-blue meadow between motion and stasis.
For a prepubescent boy encounters her, washing her hair in slow motion.
For she decides to cook okra because it’s Thursday.
For her mother tells her the secret to great tempering is panch phoran: fragrant fennel with a buzz of black mustard; a pinch of nigella; a fallowed flourish of fenugreek with a bit of cumin candour.
For she films her mother in monochrome, while cooking. It’s a long take. Because it takes as long as the Gymnopédies for the shallots to turn translucent, and partially because mother forgets all about it, and starts to knit, in the middle of summer, while the house burns to a glowing cinder.
Note: This poem has been inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s films.
The Rückenfigur
Almost a decade has gone by and she’s still standing there: one part restraint, three parts mystery; the nape of her neck lit up, exposing the otherwise subdued blue and grey surroundings. Your eyes now vicariously touch her shoulder. She is perhaps reading a letter, it’s hard to tell, with her hands and face invisible. She prefers eccentric railings over grand, majestic façades, choosing to be shrouded in the shadows, someone who likes the frayed fringes of things: trellises, trespassers and troubadours.
She’s a Hammershøi enigma, an ardent lexiphile, a connoisseur of words: archaic, arcane, invented. You send her a book of correspondences between two poets, this bit highlighted in parentheses:
"Do you still hang your words in air, ten years unfinished,
glued to your notice boards, with gaps
or empties for the unimaginable phrase —
unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect?"
She laments the fact that people don’t like carousels anymore. And letter writing. Later, in the evening, you ask her what she would like as a gift from your travels. She asks for cadmium red and portable solitude.
Note: The quotation is from the book Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.
The Girl from Ipanema
After Amy Winehouse
Let’s discuss the astral possibility of touching her
face, with a song.
Let’s queue phrases and thieves
who annotate spirits with their
hands (while she walks to the sea)
her hands so demure, made for picking
lilacs in ransacked, bended cities.
her hands touching dewy,
dispersing meteors, her
hands
strumming a squandered Fender, often
stilled with the silence of a stolen, stolid wind.
Jennifer Robertson is a poet, critic and an independent curator based in Bombay. Her debut manuscript won the Editor's choice award instituted by The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective. Her critical essays and book reviews have appeared in The American Book Review, Scroll, Mint, and Vayavya. Her poems have been published by the Emma Press, UK, The Missing Slate and Domus, and have been widely anthologised in the Global Anthology of Anglophone Poetry published by Poetry Foundation, USA, the 40 Under 40: Anthology of Post-Globalisation Poetry published by Poetrywala, India, and the Sahitya Akademi's anthology of young poets. She has convened the literary chapter for the PEN All-India Centre at Prithvi Theatre and was the literary curator for the 'Celebrate Bandra Festival'.