Precipice

This was supposed to be many things,
but not love.

Just as we had rehearsed a million times,
this is the part where we, in a delirious refrain,
collapse into a moment of silence;

after an evening of bitter conversations
and polite recriminations,
just as we begin to talk of the weather,

thank you for the coffee, Mrs H!
thank you for your time!

even as the handshakes
and empty farewells kept her busy,
(with Mrs H groaning in pain
under the unbearable burden of age
and polite misfortunes of the evening,)

on cue,
you and I would slip away at dusk
towards the edge of the precipice,

and gaze at each other
naked in the mirror,

the omnipotence of the moment
quietly growing
against the infinite vastness of the evening sky.

And when we knew
that we were dangerously close to the precipice
(one couldn’t get any closer without getting burnt!),
we would step away,

brush off the smell from each other’s bodies
with careless nonchalance,
and melt like shadows
into the thin crowd on Oxford Street.

It was a game we played every day,
tempting the hunger of the precipice
with the cold dispassion of reason
and melting away quietly into the shadows
of Paris, London, Berlin.

Yet today as we gaze at the shadows,
the evening azaan curls into a rainbow
and hangs in the silence
like an intrusive question.

The light falls as
we talk of Rimbaud, Pushkin, Dante;
trails of laughter leaving behind their trace
on wet glass windows,

and in a moment of strange indecision,
Mrs H steps into the silence

to find me naked and breathless
in the empty room,
shrinking away
alone at the heart of the precipice.

This is the part we did not rehearse;
it is a game that we played every day
but I had never got so far.