Zulfikar Ghose

THE COSMIC DANCE Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!

Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus

THE COSMIC DANCE

Proem: The Fall We had gone past the imperial palace

and come to the botanical gardens next

to the Planetarium where

sci-fi big bangs reported of galaxies

newly discovered in unexplored space.

This is a life of fixed

expectations. Let's meet again under

the labelled trees

and walk across the deserted

lawn and go instead to the Museum

of Mankind where there's an exhibition

of old African masks.

Was it not under this same tree we first

discovered love

was the constant reinvention

of the self behind a mask's aesthetic

diversion, its beauty a strategy

of predatory art?

It was among these pomegranate trees

then in flower,

remember, a red profusion

in the air, that I fell, and the red blossoms

in my collapsing sight shot up and sank

like an erratic blood

pressure reading, your hand gripping my arm,

my heart racing.

I

The Shiver But why that sudden eagerness

with which you drew me through the garden gate

past the poplars and the old yew tree?

Not a word was spoken

though encoded in transmissions my mind

received sacred

ceremonies were enacted

as in a ritual initiation

where priests read from illuminated texts.

Wed entered the garden

where light falling through the sycamore tree

on dragonflies

hovering above white lilies

made their fluttering wings look like glitter

being thrown by a festive crowd at a marriage

celebration and where

you drew me away to the camouflage

of light and shade

in which our two bodies appeared

like a trembling reflection on water.

How the light shivered and the shadows shook!

Not a word was spoken.

Just a shiver where the light parted for

the souls transport.

II

The Possessed I was looking for you, still am,

like a scientist in his research lab

who must keep testing his hypothesis

with new experiments

to prove the idea that had struck him

when listening

to a Bach cantataheavens,

what visions come when we least expect them!

Was it or was it not a fact that you

held my arm and pulled me

as if on a sudden impulse to where

the dimmed lamplight

cast a golden glow that transformed

solid objects to things that loosely float?

How difficult it is to believe now

the evidence of light

in which subtly infused you appeared then

like Salom

stripping off her successive veils

to reveal the suggestive illusion

of her flesh, dancing for the crazed Herod!

O but the sensation

was sharp enough that a distinct perfume

whirled about me

as if in a temple I stood

amid incense smoke before an idol,

a warm persuasion of piety

spiralling up my brain

and mystifying my visionas when

with dilated

pupils after an eye exam

the world appears floodlit but all one sees

is a confusion of appearances,

an abstract expression

of the material contours of form.

But then, as through

apertures between fast drifting

banks of clouds one sees a sunlit landscape

during a planes steep descent, your image

flashed on my consciousness

so clearly in full-frame close-ups of when

you possessed me

that I shut my eyes to keep fixed

in my mind your exposed body from that

fleeting revelation, and knew that there

I could hold you always,

rejecting the proof I but consorted

with illusion.

III

The Adoration My belief has nothing to do

with that ostentation of piety

when I fell into your embrace and thought

this sudden ecstasy

must be the souls palpitation after

flesh has dissolved

O not into dew, nor even

a sub-atomic particle that flies

faster than light to some unseen heaven,

but become an absence

of self, as when, entranced by the Virgins

beatific

smile in the rosy light falling

on her lips from a high stained-glass window,

not faith but pagan longing makes one draw

all temporal tension

from ones flesh and in one burst pour it all

in a mental

transfusion into the sculpted

form of eternal and divine beauty

forgive me this abstract adoration,

this unbelievers trick

which converts to a faiths confirmed dogma

a wild heathen

passion that plucks the souls delight

from a Dionysian sensuality

and loses the self in toxic pleasure.

But whats divinity,

then, if not a vision of beauty so

incredible

its truth bursts as revelation

during the blinding flare of orgasm

and, exhausted, remains a puzzling dream?

But believe me, my dear,

when plastic surgeons can mimic the form

of heavenly

beauty, with silicone implants

sculpt goddesses of earthly clay, were you

Olympia, hearing the dolls song would crank

my virile mechanism

into fine-tuned adoration of your

assembled parts.

IV

The Transfiguration But what should I do now after

the sudden quite unexpected embrace

you spontaneously pulled me into,

say, what should I do now?

You caught my breath with your lips and drew it

as death ones soul

to an unimagined new world

locked between perpetual dawn and twilight

where forms project and dissolve ceaselessly

their lifelike copies, where

illusions assume a luminous glow

and where modelled

it seemed on a god I had been

recreated for a resplendent life.

Yet I was like one of those sculpted gods

shaped in erotic play

on the temple walls at Khajuraho

in their joyous

expectation of imminent

bliss but petrified in the anxious pose

of eternal anticipation: yours

the artists privilege

to have drawn my breath and with it my blood

agitated

with continuing desire, then

left me, cast by your formidable art,

a mocked man in hard rock who until your

inspiration renews

my breath must remain an installation

senselessly stoned.

V

Some Other You What if youd taken another

form when you held me in that first embrace

and Id seen not you but some other you,

someone quite alien

who yet in that impulsive seduction

framed your being?

As when mathematicians stuck

for an answer check out alternative

symbols to confirm the original

sign is not the hidden

source of an error, so I test this

hypothesis:

that it was not the you Ive known

but some conspicuously different figure

a Madonna, say, in her cathedral nook,

all her voluptuous

flesh restored, her piety discarded

some fantasy

incarnation of an ideal

ones mind, plugged in to Platonic software,

is programmed to seek this side of heaven,

dreaming of eternal

forms: whatever her real self, she was

still illumined

in that visionary moment

with so intense a brightness as to be

featureless and without shadow, present

only as some spirit

whose body yet excited my longing

for possession.

Like white paint upon white canvas

that yet suggests theres more there than blank space,

you projected shadows where there were none,

turned silence to music,

and though of marble made, the Madonna

in my mind danced.

Perhaps it was I whod fallen

into a trance and swayed like a dervish

to music unheard by another soul,

ecstatic devotee

of visions that to the possessed appear

uniquely yours

but always elusive, a quick

pulsing glow as of fire-flies that like stars

are no longer there where their light is seen,

a presence in absence

where the self is abandoned and your you

becomes my all,

though in that all theres only you,

Gods particle, and I lost on Higgs field.

How bright the moonlight this October night,

a moth on the white lip

of a datura flower looks the silhouette

of a black leaf.

VI

The Ascension To rise again in your presence,

to have no past, to expect no future,

as on that night when you, sweet vision,

held me in your embrace

as if light had arms and unheard music

a womans hands:

caught thus by you in that embrace,

more than your body, it seemed a whole age

of enlightenment held my mind amazed

with new-fleshed ideas

and altered the customary method of

carnal discourse.

There is nothing more beautiful

than this, all the substance of life compressed

so closely within your arms and your lips

in a protracted kiss

sucking my soul free from its bondage

to heated flesh.

As when past the jets starboard wing

a pink line on the horizon at dawn

seen on the flight north at forty thousand

feet shocks ones disbelief

at being unconnected with the earth,

for there, risen,

the sun spreads its beams to commence

the cosmic dance, and the intuition springs

of divine presence in ones limbs as if

ones soul partnered the sun,

so too your attraction confirms the sense

of my being

pulled strongly into the orbit

of a heavenly body. Hold me there

in perpetual revolution when I

have risen to you, my

booster self abandoned spinning to earth

in my ascent.