Too Much
I don't think anyone has ever written a
book about this,
he tells me, tongue in jowl, but I
suspend my disbelief
just long enough falling completely
before the joke
then smiling widely and on all sides of
my face
and the subject. So, yes I am writing a
book about love.
I wrote before about a tsunami and an
uncivil war. Now
I write not quite about a tsunami
although sadness hits
like a wall of water and I have visited
black, bottomless
pits and the edges of ponds that seem
like rousing rivers
roaring to a nearby precipitous drop.
And I have felt
slings like teargas canisters fogging
my eyes and head
as I swig a tumbler of whiskey and peer
at the midnight
screen imagining the street scene near
the White House,
citizens protesting against murder of
black brothers
and sisters as I think of my island
love whose heart
is no longer open to nostalgias of the
past once
it decided that geography, a couple of
bodies of water,
an ocean, and the gulf of age, were
too much.
Indran Amirthanayagam, c) June 17,
2020
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