Moon at Half Past Noon

The summons: velvet, lined with threat—
A trap of blood, a calculus of debt.
To miss the pyre is a violence to the dead.
To skip the feast, a verdict, the elders said.
Absence is a column in the ledger, red.
They tender love to break the unbent arm;
Guilt, the quiet currency, sounds the alarm.
Thus I attend, the clan’s annexed design,
To wear the ghost of grief, the hologram’s bright shine.

Ten-thirty, ghat. The sun, a blinding blade.
The form, now fact, of what was father, laid.
No keen, just commerce: timber weighed and sold,
The ghee, the mantra, every story told
And retold until the telling was the thing.
A cousin, with a funereal grace, a king
Of ashes for a moment, sets the stage—
Sandalwood around the dark, unyielding cage.
The match: a stark, unanswerable Commence.
The flame: a vigorous, consuming Hence.
It licks the personal from common bone,
A civic duty, efficiently done.
We trade faint murmurs as the smoke suspires.
A final clearance. Next, please, for the fires.

Then, in the car’s close chrysalis of air,
A shedding of the silt, a practiced prayer
For different gods. The second conflagration
Awaits in polished, glacial isolation.
The couple thrones in perishable bloom,
A still life starving in a velvet room.
Each flashbulg pops—a theft, and not a grace.
This is the branding of the public face
Before the private quiet is installed.
The fountain’s lithium-bright weep is drawn;
The band’s chord, synthetic, greets the dawn,
Enforcing joy on a metronomic scale.
A resin future, setting without fail.

Thus, in one day, two conflagrations dealt:
One, the stark subtraction, ash on stone;
The other, a crimson aura, meant to melt
The solitary into the clone.
One fire ends. The other one begets.
I moved between their signal-smokes and debts,
A scribe of both the sacred and the cheap.
Upon my shirtfront, particulate and deep,
The first pyre’s dust inscribed its ancient stain.
Upon my shoulder, sequins, in a chain
Of bright compliance, caught the cheap champagne’s
Unmeaning sparkle in their plastic rain.
The rituals are done. The duty’s clear:
To cherish two kinds of oblivion here.