Strong Water-Colour – South East Alaska | Ashok Niyogi

This evanescent Alaskan summer
Let me give you back
Your low green weepy sky
Mixed up with my gentle misery

In hindsight
I dream your primeval dream
Your simple forests dark with time
A line here
A brush stroke there
Walking away into the black of grey
Gently pulsating
On water lapping lullabies  
Filling gaps in what has to be
Memory of first earth
Before it went a little haywire
With white water falls
Winking in virgin snow-icing
And yellow rock

I did not immediately hear the hum
Of cosmic drum in your high cavern
It sounded like cacophony
Like random microwaves
Of hearts run amok
Pathetic residual signatures
Designed to please
And In my heart for you I ached
 
As your wordless fables bent
Mocking lines of heaving buoys
Tolling mournful bells amidst
Sea-planes noisily taking off
From behind some nameless hill
Or landing smoothly in coffee cups
While taxi-boats bob up and down
Desperate for custom
In expensive marina parking lots

Short summers breed anxiety
Giant maroon peonies
And mahogany barley ale
On deck tonight
Gnats forge Callimachus’ pantomime
Cyclopes hold glasses rolling sunset wine
Watching whales dancing away
At sea
Porpoise in merry pods at summer school
Volcanoes doused with summer rain
Waning light
And arctic siren song
 
From behind white peaks
Muezzin calls
Sun to uncertain prayer
Through port holes in raven halls
Eagle sings tasseled gold
Soul songs in raucous blackish brown
Old blood from gutted salmon
Gurgling stones and swaying moss
In a world of shadowed fishy smells
On an early morning tourist wharf  

Sightless grey injected ominously
Into relentlessly silent sentinels  
Monotony wrung from me tight
Minutely loud fishing boats
Plowing wakes and solitude
With crackling untimely rainbow
In shivering head-wind
That violently lies about violet in silk
Indigo in aquamarine indignant
Green trees arrogantly untouched
As yet by one yellow moment or two
Even in a thousand receding years
Of ephemeral sunlight on an isolated hill
A low orange clutch of setting peaks
Momentary uncertain
Anonymous red elsewhere
 
On an eerie sea imagined to east
They say whales will be at play
 
An island with abandoned lighthouse
Beckons big bearded mariners
Chained to this sea-bed forever
Gone completely mad
Cellular towers incessantly chat
Long after every whale has sung and gone

Indian Review | Author Profile | Ashok Niyogi is a wandering seeker after truth. He was born in Kolkata in 1955 and graduated in economics from Presidency College. He lived and worked as an international trader in the USSR and Russia and his work involved extensive travel worldwide. He is now retired and lives in Delhi and California. He still travels hard and long and occasionally writes.
Ashok has a book of poems – Tentatively (I-Universe) -2005. His poems have been published in print and electronic journals worldwide. Under his penname Bhagirathananda, he has written two books of spiritual essays – Hence An Enquiry Into Brahman (B B Graphic) – 2012 and My Yajna (Quills Ink) -2014.