Juhu Beach, erstwhile Bombay
for Mumma
 
stores memory like bursts of rain lodge
in the crevices between two buildings:
each of us witness birds dip their beak
into this temporal pale. As a young girl,
I too, built homes out of sand and water
on the beach proximate to home; carried
some twigs, fallen flowers, and beach and
sand toys. Once, I dug into the sand closer
to the shore and it formed a shallow canal
of water. I exclaimed this in somatic bursts
to my mother seated beside me, called this
new addition the waterway. My body still
holds the image of the first blob of water:
the coarsest blue. Soon, a few fishes appear-
ed—for everything that is metaphysical,
the body offers a tangible form. Give me
something to hold against the muscle tissue:
like an ascend of the wings of a bird against
wild winds, the descend of rain’s soft bones,
and shadows that blur anew when in motion.
For all these, there is an analog—the body
that goes on, the body that shrinks and grows
and protects in accord, the body—the body—