Index for Senescence:
Item 2 of Tome Of Stars
Senescence: Introduction
In the classical Bharatanatyam margam (the collection and order of items in a dance recital), the varnam is the centerpiece. It is the longest and most emotionally rich portion. The dancer incorporates complex stories that span divine love, myth, philosophy, nature, devotion, heroism, and even contemporary themes in today's art. In Tome of Stars, the varnam appears as the second item, the twenty-nine-poem Senescence. This is another botanical term, one meaning the decay of the flowering stage.
The poems of Senescence unfold toward heartbreak. Forces too easy to understand drive the lovers apart despite their depth of feeling. All the intrusions that myth-making cannot transfigure make their appearance: trauma carried forward from unspoken pasts, ingrained patterns of avoidance and reaction, external obligations and pressures, wounds of culture and gender and expectation. Here, the poet and his beloved fail each other, even as they try to hold on.
Anthesis recited ascent. Senescence laments unraveling. Bitterness, confusion, and the recriminations lovers hurl make their appearance, complemented with the silences inhabited when words turn against them. A poet once intoxicated by light, now falls from those elevated heights to break profoundly. Some poems grapple with memory. Others with guilt. Some ache with need and some lash with anger. Through them all runs an undiminished and unresolved current of longing for the beloved. Indeed, these struggles continue into the next items, without closure, as the poet ages decades through his life yet cannot find any answer to his loss.
The title Senescence evokes aging and decay. The botanical term is rendered beyond natural context to the existential with emotional, spiritual, and mythic connotations. A seemingly celestial relationship falters under the weight of flawed embodiment. What once seemed timeless is imprisoned within time.
And yet, even in the wreckage, there are glints of the eternal. And the burden of profound loss. The poems refuse to launder story with any simple moral or unearned closure. The tale remains broken but still chanted. In truth, the greater story demands a lack of resolution. But in that brokenness, something essential survives, a sacred grief that carries forward into what comes next.
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The “Item” structure of Tome of Stars is inspired by the recital program of a classical Indian dance called Bharatanatyam. The beloved of this collection, among her many, many talents spanning arts, languages, and the sciences, was a dancer of this tradition. Bharatanatyam became tightly associated with the Stargirl in the author’s mind, and when assembling this collection, he decided to attempt to structure it following the margam, the structured program for performances of this dance form (“margam” translated as “path” or “journey”). He did this in two ways. First, Tome of Stars was divided in six Items (how the different dances in the recital are typically called in English). These six sections are both thematic and chronological, spanning the beginning of the relationship (Item 1: Anthesis, the flowering) through its dissolution to the poet’s final unending, prolonged grief and emotional devotion (Item 6: Scripture). Within each item, the actual elements of a margam show up as individual poems titled by the item name. In these sonnets, the poet tries to meld traditional interpretations of the dance item with elements of their romance, separation, and/or aspects of the writer and/or the Stargirl. More can be found in the video linked in the Background section.
Dance, Stars!
Dance, stars!
Grace bright cosmic souls,
endless hearts
within lost skies.
Art flames upon star chains!
There lies Void’s
sacred madness,
a sweet, shattered
space of truth-pain.
Thus, kiss song-joy, magic mortal!
Beneath worlds,
divine, sublime gods
shall dawn tears
in wild touch!
I'll begin the analysis of verse with a poem that is an outlier in the collection.
"Dance, Stars!" was not written so much as it was assembled as poetically as possible from a word frequency breakdown of the remainder of the collection. (Seriously)
After finishing the first drafts of Tome of Stars, I did various breakdowns of the text searching for literary "tics", both known and unrecognized. Many automated tools exist to perform such work (which I’ve used for my novels in the past), and indeed I found I had even in this (relatively smaller as compared to my novels) collection a set of repeated phrases and words that could not be justified in their repetition solely by the needs of the poem but which likely find their deep roots in my subconscious. It is impossible to root out all such verbal traps, but one can reduce their occurrence.
As part of this, I had one such tool generate a word and phrase frequency list. Here is the word list from an earlier version of Tome of Stars:
dance 22, stars 22, bright 20, grace 20, cosmic 19, soul 19, spirit 18, endless 18, hearts 18, within 18, lost 18, skies 15, art 15, flame 15, star 15, chains 14, lies 13, void 12, sacred 12, madness 12, sweet 12, shattered 12, space 12, truth 11, pain 11, thus 11, kiss 11, song 11, joy 11, magic 11, mortal 11, beneath 11, worlds 11, divine 10, sublime 10, gods 10, shall 10, dawn 10, tears 10, wild 10, touch 10, shine 9, stellar 9, timeless 9, embrace 9, galaxies 9, kissed 9, beauty 9, sought 9, bond 9, deep 9, hope 9, spun 9, born 9, broken 9, dream 9, apart 9, prayer 8, transcendent 8, seek 8, shame 8, seas 8, spirits 8, stage 8, doom 8, embraced 8, fate 8, cruel 8, thousand 8, beyond 8, silent 8, darkness 8, glow 8, failed 8, flesh 8, break 8, chant 7, warped 7,, nights 7, sing 7, verse 7, pure 7, dread 7, fairy 7, hold 7, whispered 7, silence 7, distant 7, blind 7, dreams 7, steps 7, sight 7, sleep 7, sea 7, stargirl 7…..
The phrase list was most useful for exact reuse sins, prompting some reconsiderations and rewrites of some sonnets. The word frequency list also prompted changes, although this was more challenging. However, as I was looking at the list, my mind started stringing the most frequent words together into phrases. Before I realized it, I was composing a poem with the absurd constraints of (1) keeping the frequency order as much as possible and (2) not introducing any other nouns or verbs, but allowing myself to introduce articles, prepositions, and other elements (and at times modifying the words—changing singular to plural, verbing nouns, etc.). I mostly kept to the rules.
The end product shocked me in being not only a poem I enjoyed reading, but also one that felt like an eccentric but not inaccurate encapsulation of the collection. I then decided to include it as an Epigraph and Foreword, inaugurating the book.
Studying this poem itself (for my own meanings and word choice, etc.) is an analysis of a distilled version of Tome of Stars, the context lost in a mapping of meaning to numerical occurrence. The word choice is built into the manner in which the poem was created and reflects, in a direct but distorted manner, all the verse that is to come (that I do plan to analyze). To expand on why these words appear, and in the order they do, and what it means vis-à-vis the author's intent, would be to try to distill the planned poem-by-poem analysis into a single essay.
That I will not do. Instead, I'll leave it as a preview — a “teaser trailer” for what comes — as it both summarizes and also resamples to near meaninglessness what comes after, whatever my efforts to imbue a loaded word list with its own life.
Varnam
At time’s first breath, her pallavi proclaimed,
And themes profound within the Void were born.
The Music of the Ainur then caught flame,
Cold emptiness with holy light adorned.
Her steps were sanctified—each motion, grace;
Her smile then guiding nascent forms to art.
Together, worlds and galaxies embraced,
Two hundred billion trillion stars took part.
But only then the Stargirl wove our tale,
A million mudras painting through the skies.
Her eyes and face sang joy and sorrow’s wail,
And heaven’s heartache was in dance reprised.
And as her teermanam divinely gleamed,
All souls were freed, creation then redeemed.
The varnam is the Bharatanatyam recital's centerpiece. It's the longest section and one of the most emotional. In Tome of Stars, the varnam is both a poem as well as represented by the item/section “Senescence” (a botanical term for the death and decay of a flower, the step after “Anthesis”). In this section, the unraveling of the love affair begins from the pressures of circumstance and the inherent psychological flaws of the lovers.
The poem Varnam begins with another celestial depiction of the Stargirl, combining Hindu elements with Tolkien’s cosmogony in music. With “her pallavi proclaimed” and “music of the Ainur,” one sees the celestial symphony of Tolkien (the Ainur being the angelic beings who “sang” creation into being, later on Earth called the Valar, or “Powers”) merged with the classical Indian musical term “pallavi,” which means the beginning element of a song (from an older Sanskrit word for “sprouting” or “new leaves”). This Tolkien-Hindu goddess of the stars fills the Void with generative music. Like in Elentári, she is depicted as guiding the universe in a cosmic dance of stars and galaxies (that she engendered).
But the volta comes with a critical switch. For the first time, the dancer is split apart from the identity of the beloved, so that the Stargirl and the human woman begin to have a separation between them. This new cosmic figure of the Stargirl “wove our tale”, telling the story of the beloved and poet as a third person. Throughout the heavens, she uses “a million mudras” (expressive hand gestures with layered meaning), and her “eyes and face sang joy and sorrow’s wail” directly referencing their disastrous romance in the language of classical dance, the abhinaya of the performance with face gestures so central and practiced in Bharatanatyam. She literally dances their story of “heaven’s heartache.”
The ending is cryptic, even to the poet. When writing the poem, his mind moved to the crescendo dance element of the teermanam, which “divinely gleamed” in a process freeing “all souls” (presumably thus also the poet and beloved) in an act of cosmic redemption. This now makes no sense to the poet. He doesn’t know why he would write that as he has no sense of being freed or redeemed, and cannot imagine how it could come to be so. Perhaps it was just the creative movement of his mind through a dance performance written in verse expressing some subconscious belief that his life-long loss could be transformed. But he doesn’t know. He had considered rewriting the couplet to reflect what seems to be his true reality, but decided in the end to leave it as original envisioned, however discordant with his daily experience it might seem.
Siyotanka
The elder sycamore had spent its songs,
Surrendered to the woodland’s silent stage.
Old branches, grown of whisper winds, still strong,
Are salvaged spirits with new life engaged.
Through seasoned wood, a channel straight is mined
To form its beating heart—a passage new.
A cylinder awaits a breath divine,
From cutting edge and totem, mated true.
Six portals to the womb of sound are placed,
Precision-pierced, birth notes in melody.
A bridge from mortal strife to heaven’s grace,
Her raga, writ in runic harmony.
Sweet Stargirl’s name shall sing in psalms so dear,
The stars themselves shall cease their dance to hear.
This poem describes in practical and symbolic terms the crafting of a Native American courting flute (siyotanka is a Lakota word for an instrument that was fashioned by some of the Plains tribes in North America). The flute is held up as a vessel of personal and spiritual expression, representing the poet's devotion to the beloved and the sacredness he felt in their relationship. The writer has, in fact, made such flutes, and decades ago gifted one to the Stargirl. It was tuned specifically to an Indian raga with her name (which introduced crafting challenges).
The poem follows a course of transformation. In the first quatrain an old tree that has lived a long life, “had spent its songs,” dies, leaving its corpse in the “woodland’s silent stage.” (Note that the tree already is imbued with musical qualities of singing and being on a stage) Some of its branches, still possessing spiritual potency, are “salvaged,” reclaimed by the flutemaker.
In the second quatrain, the transformation of the branch to flute begins. A hollow core is bored through the center to “form its beating heart,” a phrase used because the vibrations of sound that make the music will be formed from that resonant chamber. It “awaits a breath divine,” not just the breath of the flute player, but something transcendent to convert the material object to a spiritual one. Part of that process is the fashioning of the “cutting edge” with totem, elements specific to the sound-generating mechanism of this unique flute design of the plains tribes.
Once sound is given spirit, it is enhanced with tone holes, where “six portals to the womb of sound are placed.” These “precision-pierced” holes create the tuning, the possible notes the flute can produce, and thus the nature and variety of songs it can access (its character or voice). Here the spiritual nature of the offering to the beloved is revealed. It is a “bridge from mortal strife to heaven’s grace” that plays “her raga.” A raga is a complicated concept in Indian classical music, more complicated than merely a “scale” as it is understood in Western classical music. A raga is more than notes, encompassing also intonation, ornamentation, and emotional expression.
“Her raga” is both the raga that shares her name and “her nature,” so that songs produced on the flute are supposed to reflect in some mysterious way aspects of her character. Thus, the final couplet proclaims that the flute will sing the Stargirl’s name (using the ancient idea of a name capturing the essence of a being), and because of that, and who she is, the “stars themselves will cease their dance to hear.”
Arangetram
I sought a starlit stone from ancient seas,
An ammolite of light, both bold and rare.
Its colors bright—a blend of memories,
Of love and longing, water, open air.
Rich green’s your hue—the sari stunned, you wore.
Deep red, rich garnet gem caressed your breast.
In this new pearl, ten hues cached in its core,
Imprisoned stellar rays from cosmic quests.
A rose-gold glyph engraved upon the mount,
A chain of diamonds, asterism new.
A teardrop shape of dropped tears shaped throughout,
The stone its crown—a worthy jewel for you.
A treasure to be worn when you would dance,
Light India, and steep the world in trance.
The poem describes a long effort by the poet to commission a singular gift for the beloved's formal debut dance performance in Bharatanatyam (the Arangetram). The gift was a pendant adorned with the rare gemstone ammolite. Tragically, with the collapse of their relationship, the pendant was never given and the poet never witnessed her Arangetram.
The item then became a haunted relic, a constant reminder of numerous losses. The pendant in the illustrated edition and lyric video is from a photograph of the design he had made. What is especially painful is the role the poet played in her building toward her Arangetram and the final ending. The beloved had given up Bharatanatyam to focus on her career, but the poet recognized that dance was integral to who she was and her happiness. He therefore encouraged her for years to take it up again, and she did. And for decades, he has never known whether she eventually did her Arangetram, his Indian visa expired in an old, discarded passport, never used.
The final madness is that as he held onto the pendant, and, like some magical artifact, it haunted his mind, at last in despair and self-hatred (deeming himself unworthy and the gift meaningless to the beloved), he sold it. Almost immediately he regretted his rash decision, but was unable to buy back the jewel from the recipient who adored it. The song is thus a harsh emblem of emotional collapse. It is a testament to how profoundly grief can distort, and how far from grace even the most loving intentions can fall.
Consummation
In later years, I would rewrite our tale,
Romanticize our shamed and hidden hearts.
In novels spanning space with star-crossed wails,
Our proxies honored love when torn apart.
They kissed on oceaned worlds that swam in seas
Of stars within the Magellanic Clouds,
That overlooked our brilliant galaxy,
With night skies sketched in detonations proud.
But in the quiet breaths between our fears,
Where timeless truth sought freedom from its cage,
One night, your sadness shattered cautious years,
And passion overflowed upon life’s stage.
And nothing I might write could hope to frame,
That morn you shone with starlight’s brightest flame.
This is a sonnet contrasting imagined fantasy and lived reality. It starts by considering how in years after their separation, the poet would write into his novels characters and elements in a manner to recast their story. In these tales the lovers would break through stigmatized love, brave the universe and its judgments together, in sharp contrast to what happened in their actual lives. The third quatrain delves back in time, focusing on one specific night when years of caution broke down with emotional desperation. As she wept and could not be consoled, the poet raced through 1000 things to say or do to relieve her of suffering, so much her pain hurt him. Instinctively, he reached for her, and as they locked eyes, they broke their stated goal to forgo consummating their love physically. The final couplet presents a transcendental, if transient, moment of luminosity the next morning. The poet was startled to see her transformed, far more beautiful than she had ever looked to him (which is saying more than any reader of this could possibly understand), a deep confidence and seeming sense of fulfillment radiating from her. To his eyes, she took on the nature of a goddess descended to the mortal plane. It was the closest he had ever felt to witnessing divinity incarnate.
Seven Years
A lightning flash entwined our separate souls,
Still trapped by ties unbreakable, professed.
To oaks, we pledged we’d let young saplings grow,
Before our hidden love could be confessed.
Each year, the strain of lies and stealth increased,
And warped and wounded both in different ways.
Our love—a quasar’s fire—never ceased,
But battled with the venom of our days.
Too long apart, too scarce the time we shared;
Each word turned sharpened dagger, misconstrued.
We battled wounds and lives left torn and bared,
Our treasured hearts, in lunacy, we slew.
Our union glimmered in its splendored dawn,
But heaven fathers hell in poison spawned.
This sonnet summarizes their seven-year love affair, covering its bright origin to final disintegration. It functions as a signpost to the reader. Rather than cover with individual poems everything alluded to in the verse, Seven Years consolidates the issues (some of which are considered in their own poems to come) to prevent this item and tome from reaching unmanageable proportions. Quatrain one considers the birth of their love (reminiscent of “Starstruck”) but layers over it the terrible situation they endured: his inability hurt others in leaving his family. Thus the line “To oaks we pledged we’d let young saplings grow,” indicates their decision to let his children grow up before they would be together. But this entailed a life of deception and concealment, one that “warped and wounded both in different ways.” Their love, compared to a quasar in the second quatrain, “never ceased”, but their union was assaulted but “the venom of our days.” The years and distance broke the pair, first by leading to estrangement where “every word turned sharpened dagger, misconstrued” then ending in a separation likened by the poet to murder (“Our treasured hearts, in lunacy, we slew”). The final couplet summarizes the progression from heaven to hell due to the toxic nature of their circumstances.
On a Pincushion
Once, Princess Pyra flared in Fireland,
Her visage blazing brighter than twelve suns—
Her movements, dancing magma; touch, a brand;
Embrace, a conflagration none had won.
Prince Fluvius burst forth through tempest skies,
Wild ocean churns of muscled hurricanes.
Bright ammolites shone through his piercing eyes,
His storm-kissed majesty broke sirens’ strains.
Two lovers, cursed by bond most ruinous,
For flame and water, each annihilate.
But might love guide silked worm to chrysalis,
Birth newborn beauty in transcendent state?
Entwining, they knew metamorphosis:
So may we rise from blighted doom, and kiss.
This sonnet retells the fairy tale of Princess Pyra and Prince Fluvius. They are characters from a story in a collection of tales by Mary De Morgan called “On a Pincushion”. Pyra is a fire fairy and Fluvius a water prince, and although they fell in love, their natures and political circumstances made it impossible for them to be together: “For flame and water, each annihilate.” They find a solution to this conundrum of annihilation, paradoxically, but risking their destruction. By joining, the are reborn, their previous natures remade, rendering them two different creatures that can be together. Instead of obliteration, they find transformation. Once upon a time, the beloved told the poet this story, convinced that it mirrored the impossibility of their own union, hoping that they could transcend those difficulties. But real life is not a fairy tale.
Into the West
I crept the student hall’s fluorescent hum—
A crime in progress, yet my soul sang true.
Guitar slung ’cross my back and heart a drum—
The shrine ordained for me was always you.
The universe tipped sideways as I sighed
Within your doorway. Never should I leave!
Ten thousand days of life with you dreamed by,
Of simple hearth and home, a life we’d weave.
I played for you a song from Elder Years,
Of Mithlond, where the scarred seek Valinor.
Sobs wet your sculpted cheeks; you shook with tears.
Our pathos pled for salves from healing shores.
But passage was denied. Our doom would ring—
Sweet night, the last you’d ever hear me sing.
This sonnet is about a secret meeting between the beloved and the poet. It is significant for three reasons in his mind: (1) for the power of walking into her living space, how it hit him like a tsunami glimpsing what a shared life could be like, (2) that he sang the song “Into the West” by Annie Lenox and it moved her to tears because it reflected the pain and hope for deliverance in their own tragic affair, and (3) despite those hopes, this would be the last time he would be free to sing for her before their final parting: “But passage was denied. Our doom would ring/Sweet night, the last you’d ever hear me sing.”
“Into the West” was the concluding song for the final of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films, namely, “The Return of the King.” It reflected aspects of Tolkien’s mythology where the Undying Lands of Valinor lay hidden by the Powers in the far west of Middle Earth. The Elves could undertake passage to the Undying Lands, but mortals were forbidden. Exceptions were made, however, and one of those is shown in Frodo Baggins leaving the Shire on an Elven boat at the end of the book and film. Tolkien stated that Frodo was granted a special dispensation because he had born an immortal’s burden (the corrupting power of Sauron’s spirit in the Ring) and was wounded beyond any possible healing in Middle Earth. Thus, especially in this context, “Into the West” is a song about grace, mercy, and deliverance from untreatable suffering. The poet sang it for her because of their long pain. And she understood. And wept.
“But passage was denied.” However, as mortals wounded by their very mortal failings, the gods did not grant them any dispensation, allowing them to reap the harvest of their inadequacies. And now forever the poet has lost her, will never see her dance, and she will never hear him sing to and for her again (although as her affection morphed to antipathy, it is now only he who would desire such a thing).
Caniclades
I stood as beacon in your darkest plights,
Each tempest wild that rocked your fragile craft—
From scholar’s struggles late through many nights,
To strife with guru’s slights, choreographed.
You vowed, so certain, time would bring no dread,
And when bright silver wove your strands of night,
No fear nor dye would rest upon your head,
For nothing could diminish our love’s light.
Then came your call, one strand of gray revealed.
Though I proclaimed you Star Queen all my days,
My chanted words your venomed voice repealed:
“Your music fails,” you spat, with distant gaze.
I see now that our union was your need,
And on this day our doom you had decreed.
This sonnet recounts a terrible exchange between the beloved and the poet, one that was initially bewildering to him, but into which decades would finally grant him insight. The beloved had discovered her first gray hair. He naively interpreted her distress (despite previous talks they'd had about not fearing growing older) as related to her appearance and/or his attraction and love for her. He very earnestly assured her that she would be "Star Queen all my days.”
Instead of calming her, she only became more upset, finally cutting him off, saying “I'm not getting what I need from you.” He also took this at face value for many years, that his proclamations that he would ever adore her (seen too painfully over the years to be anything but false) were disbelieved and/or that she did not value such love. It was a very painful exchange in which he felt his deepest and truest feelings were rejected and devalued. That his deepest adoration was found unworthy.
It would take him years to understand, or believe he understood, what was really happening: that a young woman, frozen in a relationship that could not be fully realized, saw her youth and life slipping away. That what she needed from him was not promises that she would remain attractive, but a life with him before so much of life had burned out in her. Her words that “I'm not getting what I need from you” were understood later as much more deeply significant than his immature mind could process at the time, and were in some ways the death-knell of their relationship: “I see now that our union was your need/And on this day our doom you had decreed.”
Secret Places
You danced your life in code—a ciphered poem,
With phrases slant, enigmas half-revealed.
I begged for clues within your guarded tome,
But every lock remained tightly concealed.
No keystone opened access to your halls,
Where truth hid, draped in shadows from display.
Pled questions died beside your lover’s calls,
With answers, weakly whispered, cached away.
Time’s patient fingers wove suspicion’s thread
Through tapestries oblique of tales you spun.
Now doubt’s persistent mutters drug my head,
With questions of the truths you chose to shun.
These riddles of your heart—still unexplained—
Suggest bleak darkness, long fought to constrain.
This sonnet explores the emotional/biographical opacity of the beloved, who despite their long relationship, maintained “cached away” many aspects of her life and feelings. The poet came to believe many years later that the beloved possessed significant repressed trauma and refused to share elements of her life from the past and present that related to that: “These riddles of your heart still unexplained/ Suggest bleak darkness, long fought to constrain.”
So many aspects of her past were kept hidden from him, and the summaries of her life were strange and hard to put together. As a practical example that avoids revealing identifying details, he had for years asked for photos from her childhood and adolescence. The poet was frankly a bit obsessed with witnessing every stage of her life, and longed to see her as a child and developing woman. He wished he could have been a part of every stage, and even wrote the realization of that into a science fiction novel (where a lover is able to experience the early life of the beloved due to time distortion). However, years went by and every request was ignored, so that to this day, he has not one emblem of her youth, while he freely shared with her many from his past.
The poet still struggles to understand why she hid so much. He does not know, but the “obvious” answer was that there was darkness in her past that she did not want exposed or to deal with even in her own mind.
He recognizes he may be projecting because of his own repressed trauma from childhood abuse that he kept from her (out of shame and worry it would push her away). But it is possible their relationship was marked from the beginning by the mistakes and personality distortions of two people with deep and unaddressed psychic wounds.
Degraded
From sublime heights of heaven, hurled to hell,
Vile doors of degradation then to part,
We stained our love in furtive, hidden spells,
Defiled the truths once nourished in our hearts.
We lied and snuck, constricted vibrant breaths;
We starved, deformed sweet saplings of our souls.
We kissed in shadowed tunnels’ covert depths;
Our roots and branches withered in dark holes.
The worst betrayal was ardor’s fleshly bond,
What nature shaped, communion’s holy kiss.
Long months entwined, as prostitution spawned,
We marred a stellar love, our grace dismissed.
I begged we cease; you wept and pulled me near.
Our sacrament dissolved within your tears.
A clandestine love affair induces psychic and moral corrosion, no matter how bright the bond, how deep the love. It is a poison that sickens the lovers. This sonnet tries to convey the sense of that in the poet's awareness.
Like Seven Years it begins with a summary of how their circumstance and choices corrupted their affection, but Degraded focuses on the secrecy, the lies, and the constriction of the natural expressions of love, deforming “sweet saplings of our souls.” It had become so painful to the poet, this degradation, that he asked that they end their trysts, for he felt it cheapened their bond and sullied their intimacy. However, she begged that they continue, not able to endure emotionally their physical separation. And the poet, ever poisoned by toxic empathy (see Once upon a Time below), did as she asked, even as he felt it destroyed them.
Money Back Guarantee
Give all. Give more! The boon is hers to shame;
A dagger waits for every heart laid bare.
And when a spirit’s stripped for her to maim,
She’ll spit, and cut you down without a care.
She’d given up her love of dance to style
A life afar, in culture strange and base.
Adoring her, each rose that brought her smile,
I saw that art would gift her spirit grace.
Bharatanatyam—I her steps restored!
I coaxed, insisted she embrace that call,
And thus she spun and pranced on heaven’s floor,
While I was exiled from her hallowed hall.
The gold I gave to help her climb that stage?
She threw back in my face in fits of rage.
This sonnet is about one of the first deep ruptures in the relationship. Bitterness and sarcasm enter into the tone of the words for the first time. It centers on the money given to (and accepted by) by the beloved from the poet to help fund the high costs of her arangetram (a central rite of passage in Bharatanatyam dancing). She turned and rejected this support due to hurtful aspects of their covert circumstances, returning the money in anger. For the poet, it was much more than a failed monetary exchange, but spoke to the collapsing of their shared dreams and emotional trust. Since he had brought her back to dance, and did so for her needs from his love for her, this rejection was a rejection of an intimate and spiritual offering. He had assumed he held a blessed space in her heart for his support of her dance, and her actions here felt like being cast out and his love dismissed. It was for him devotion desecrated, and the beginning of a life-long exile, as it turned out, from her world of artistic performance.
Once Upon A Time, Part 1
Long ere the world had donned its present guise,
There roamed a child, oppressed by unseen doom.
Warned early through his cursed, foresighted eyes,
He dreamed a future drowned in endless gloom.
A misspent life roved forest lanes unknown;
His mother traced her path from man to man.
No hearth could last—no home to call his own,
His shelter shifted on parched desert sand.
In shadowed dens, between these fractured dawns,
She drank from him what Nature dares not name,
Corrupting love in its most sacred bond,
While innocence bore burden of her shame.
When nurture’s milk becomes a demon’s kiss,
Each poisoned cell is marked for the abyss.
This sonnet is a flashback, the first of the “Once Upon a Time” quartet of related pieces, where the poet's childhood is recast as a (dark) fairy tale. It serves the purpose of giving the reader of Tome of Stars what the poet thinks is critical background, without which the poet’s flawed choices are hard to understand. The beloved also could not understand him and eventually left him for the psychological chains that prevented him from leaving his old life to be with her. He could not explain it at the time. He did not understand it. Not until his fifth decade when long periods of self-reflection during the stillness of the COVID-19 pandemic afforded him insight into his past and its effect on him. In desperate optimism, he tried to share these insights with the Stargirl, but she was finished with anything to do with him, and he received only silence, and in one blighted instance, furious and hateful reprimand (see Letter, December 8, 2020).
Part 1 tells a traumatic story, one of childhood instability, abandonment, and abuse (specifically, maternal sexual and emotional abuse). The lyrics suggest that these long, formative years would warp his psychology into self-doubt, self-hatred, stunted emotional development, and future relationship sabotage through adaptations that proved toxic outside of the environment in which he lived as a child: “When nurture’s milk becomes a demon’s kiss/Each poisoned cell is marked for the abyss.”
Thus the poet sees himself (examine the poem ur a lost person). As Part 3 makes clear, for “one brief eon” with the Stargirl, he felt he had been redeemed from his personal malignancies. But it was an illusion. Her departure, her words, proved to his mind that indeed, there was no escaping the rot within him. She rendered the final judgment and ultimate damnation.
Once Upon A Time, Part 2
She trained him early how to bend—and break.
She deemed his heart’s extinction, virtue’s crown.
Thus truth became illusion in her wake—
A venomed swamp with meaning choked and drowned.
A sapling warped by dark enchanter’s spell,
His spirit spread through twisted tracks untrue;
No magic could unmake her binding’s hell,
That marred his mind and rent his sight askew.
He sought a weaver of remembered chains,
Who spun his past into a bridal veil.
Their bond she sowed from duty’s cold refrain;
His passions languished in a frozen jail.
He prayed for guidance, but the gods were cold.
So, shaped by sin, he wed and sold his soul.
This sonnet is a flashback, the second of the “Once Upon a Time” quartet of related pieces, where the poet's childhood is recast as a fairy tale. This one continues the psychological analysis by linking the fallout of childhood abuse to catastrophic adult life choices. In a recurring topic, it focuses on how that early trauma destroyed the poet's ability to act authentically regarding his own emotional truths and desires, having learned, been trained by emotional blackmail and punishment, to betray even his deepest truths in service to the needs and demands of others. The central event of this piece is his decision to marry someone he did not love, but who needed him. It is framed in a manner to show it was an inevitable, predictable outcome of psychological conditioning from a young age. In this it draws a causal line from psychic violation to spiritual treason. It also sets the stage of emotional and psychological dependencies that later were his contributions to the failure of the relationship with the beloved.
Once Upon A Time, Part 3
Designers of his doom spun forth their game,
And bound him deep in sorrowful descent,
Then raised before his eyes a circled flame,
And through it soared a spirit, radiant.
A fairy, woven from the god’s bright threads,
With eyes agleam, as stars upon the sea,
Her cosmic wings about his form were spread;
Her touch—a spell, a binding sorcery.
She breathed her sacred sign into his soul,
Ten tones of power, born of realms divine;
Songs starshine steeped—a mangled mind made whole.
He drank her fire’s consecrated wine.
Hell’s chains were shorn; her dawn embraced his night,
For one brief eon, ever filled with light.
This sonnet is a flashback, the third of the “Once Upon a Time” quartet of related pieces, where the poet's childhood is recast as a fairy tale. Part 3 dramatizes the arrival of the Stargirl in the poet's life. She is cast as a transformative power and described in mythical terms that are celestial and salvific. Compared to Part 1 and Part 2, her entrance into his awareness is a “candle in the dark” moment where, to his psychological perception, she is the light in the emptiness of his existence, delivering him through otherworldly love. He once told her that he felt like a creature cowering in a dark cavern, and that she was the light of an angel appearing in that void. Her presence, their brief and troubled time together, was the first time he felt truly loved. Through her love, he felt that he might have some kind of worth, that the doom he felt hanging over him from childhood was not inevitable. He was madly in love with her, and that such a brightly being would seemingly return this affection was transformative. However, the poem begins with “Designers of his doom”, personifying the forces of existence as maleficent puppet masters, who placed him in the clutches of perversion as a child to wreck his psyche and then opened a portal to heaven briefly (“one brief eon, ever filled with light”), all the while planning something worse in the fall from this grace that would follow.
Once Upon A Time, Part 4
A baleful hex, a yoke of darkest wight,
Ensnared his mind in chains of hateful lies.
This wrath of lunacy recoiled from right,
Lest he condemn himself in his own eyes.
Past cancer poisoned, through his spirit chewed,
Excreting slimes of toxic empathy.
The tears of others drowned all he breathed true,
Thoughts paralyzed by noxious sympathy.
Thus, Stargirl—magic’s child—arose in flight,
Aggrieved he loved her less than love’s just claim.
His heart, too frail to stand, too quick to blight,
She judged unworthy—pierced, forever shamed.
His doom complete, he reaped fate’s final spell.
Her light was gone. The portal shut. Night fell.
This sonnet is a flashback, the fourth and last of the “Once Upon a Time” quartet of related pieces, where the poet's childhood is recast as a fairy tale. Part 4 is a rending exposition of the poet's failure to transcend his damaged psyche and its defects described in Part 1 and Part 2 (compulsive guilt, emotional self-betrayal, fight-or-flight emotional responses). This leads to the loss of the one redemptive force he's ever felt: the Stargirl. All the worse, her departure is one of ultimate judgment, her magical grace revoked, his person deemed unworthy of her love. The song ends as permanent exile from light into darkness, where the ending of Part 1 is realized: “each poisoned cell is marked for the abyss.”
August, 2011
And so, in August, twenty one and one,
What Fate had carved into my bones, so passed.
The shame, the lies, the poisons old, then won,
And proved a bond eternal could not last.
My heart I’d tear in two to love you whole,
Impale my core and wreck a family.
But wounding others—children—burnt my soul;
I sought your solace, begged on bended knee.
From Himalayan heights, my trust you’d fling;
Withdraw your arms when I most needed care.
This sin I’d suffer sole—you’d take no sting
Of judgment’s blade, that I alone would bear.
We shattered on that cataclysmic day,
With fiendish cries that tolled ardor’s decay.
With this sonnet, the narrative in Tome of Stars leaves the long flashback to his past and falls into the “present”, mirroring the last quatrain and couplet of Once upon a Time, Part 4, at the central collapse of the relationship that occurs in August, 2011. Trauma, guilt, moral duty, unmet emotional needs, misunderstandings from distance and time, all synergize in a catastrophic crisis. The shared world with the beloved breaks completely under the weight of external pressures (marriage, children, societal expectations) and the personal failings of the couple. As decades would prove painfully, there would be no coming back from it, no reconciliation, no redemption of any kind.
Metamorphosis
My Stargirl spoke: “If truth should fade away,
If in your mind my love is slain by lies,
Within my core, its light will always stay,
The purest note, resounding through the skies.
“If you should judge my heart as cold deceit,
And claim it bore no truth, nor honest light,
Then you’re not he with whom I felt complete,
The man who kissed my days and warmed my nights.
“Yet faith burns bright, a flame that guides my way,
Affirming you’re the answer to my plea:
Devoted to me ever, come what may,
My man adored, and yes, you’ll always be.”
Now labeled snake, derangement is my fate;
Consumed in curses, twisting love to hate.
Short summary (more details to come): This sonnet is a lyrical adaptation of a message from the beloved written in an email in 2005. “Metamorphosis” juxtaposes this early message of faith and intimacy with the collapse of trust that led to mutual estrangement. The three quatrains are based on the beloved's words (turned into rhyme with meter), whereas the final couplet is in the voice of the poet. The song at its core is about stunned bewilderment at an incomprehensible transformation, a fall from grace to vilification and emotional inversion, a baffled defeat the poet would never truly come to terms with or ever understand.
“ur a lost person”, text from 2011
I’m lost—a person lost—you spat at me,
And you were right, for I’m condemned, depraved;
And now I see your love had ceased to be.
We drifted cold in space, momentum’s slave.
I am a lost psychotic—naked heart,
Long-mangled, twisted spawn of demon’s seed,
Filth-ruined, ghastly, shattered shard apart.
Depart from me—run, each of you, I plead.
My life—a waste, parade of panicked flights,
Avoiding monsters’ drooling, blood-soaked jaws;
Mistakes from dungeon’s chains and trauma’s blights—
It’s empty to me now, a fruitless cause.
Far better if I’d never drawn a breath:
I’m lost in losing you and yearn for death.
This is one of the darkest poems in Tome of Stars. It relates a pathological state induced by the beloved's abandonment and amplified by her words through a message she sent him in 2011: “ur a lost person.” The poet internalizes this accusation deep within himself in a place where despair, self-hatred, and an annihilation of identity churn. The song spirals in accusatory and damning expressions of shame and ego-murder, most horribly in the final lines that, beyond death, wish for the erasure of ever having existed. These feelings are the culmination of a lifelong sense of worthlessness and fundamental irredeemability. The sonnet is not a song about heartbreak. It is an existential scream from a disintegrating soul. And while the poet has possessed too strong a sense of responsibility to others and the world to end his life (hence his inability to be the with the Stargirl as he would have wished), it remains true that he still fundamentally sees himself this way, in fact, all the more for her rejection and words about him seeming to confirm his worse views of himself. Ur a lost person. And thus suicide is avoided (or so it seems), he longs for that end. And has for decades. And longs most strongly for oblivion, an end of awareness and memory. Not even the concept of heaven offers to his mind relief (Heaven Failed: “And should hell vanish via heaven’s will/Would trauma from life’s hell consume us still?”).
Algorithmic Hearts
In nature’s lab, our love was preordained—
An enzymed waltz of mating DNA,
With pheromones and nerves, precisely trained,
And MHC alleles to guide our way.
Each fancy, sliced by time’s selective blade,
Each quirk that made us smile—precisely planned.
We’re actors in a cosmic masquerade,
Parts played that we can’t pray to understand.
What then, this ardor, flamed with truth that shone,
When chemistry controlled each tender sigh?
Cold knowledge stings; we are but strings and bone,
Long yanked by hands unseen that pull and ply.
In this vast void, cold blinded laws hold sway—
Our passions merely atoms, dumb at play.
This sonnet is in the voice of the rationalist portion of the poet's psyche, one that, now freed from the immediate drug of “being in love,” deconstructs romance as an epiphenomenon of natural processes and laws. Removing all transcendence and meaning from his relationship with the beloved, he dissects it as a programmed “waltz of mating DNA” where chemistry and natural selection conspire to induce organisms to breed and reproduce. In this view, he and the beloved were simply molecular machines following their programming, and every sense he had of transcendence and beauty was part of that blueprint with no intrinsic significance. In the same way his rational states dissect religious experience, so the intellect chastises the heart for its delusion, laying out the reality of existential emptiness. This is not a new position, and in fact back to the poem Trilogy when the poet was abandoned by his first love (he has been intimate with three women, two he wished to marry, one he did), he has indulged in this spurning of “foul biochemistry” before. Whereas it lasted for years in the past, the rational mind was and is dominated by the poet’s affection and his sense of the Stargirl’s magic. That reductionist voice never goes away (indeed, how could it not be so?), but it has found the going tough against the tidal wave of feeling engendered by the beloved. Pity the voice of reason as it is drowned by the tsunami of irrationality.
Singularity
Let darkness close; foul fangs in throes confine.
I fear it not—no night could match the dread
Of spirit’s void, where her star’s soul should shine,
Or chill my heart, as light by absence bled.
What terrors hunt that I do not endure?
What unlight blacker than her empty space?
Should shadow bring its blight, devoid of cure,
I know that even death dies in this place.
I pray for dawn, and beg the whispered vow
She left in love afore, sung pure as flame.
Although I drown in famished silence, bowed,
Her light could blaze, and I might breathe her name.
I blindly chant through hell’s eternity:
“My dearest Stargirl, please, come back to me.”
Singularity is sonnet of emotional annihilation. Absence is present as a tangible reality. Death “dies” within the deep void of grief. The “unlight” of his current universe is darker than nothing.
The title comes from the aftermath of the gravitational collapse of a star to a black hole, a point of infinite compression and curvature of spacetime, a mathematical and physical impossibility where modern science breaks down. It calls back to the figure of the Stargirl but also symbolizing the collapse of the poet's internal reality. He is described as a planet orbiting a star that has vanished, leaving only a vacuum, silence, and eternal emptiness. Yet still the gravity of love and longing binds him to infinitely circle the dead star.
In this endless cycle about her absence, he repeats a chant, “come back to me,” which will be heard in the later poem Rusali Radha, Rusala Madhava. This chant was real, and the poet began it one long climb up a mountain on her birthday, suffering from a spell of magical thinking, hoping that pouring out his plea into the universe could make it happen. The poet prays in the sonnet that the vows between them, both spoken and given wordlessly (like the gift of “stars from her eyes” in Refraction), will return her presence to his cosmos. However, in the present day, he no longer speaks those words after she struck him down after his letter in 2020, for she very clearly noted that she would never in fact come back to him.
This poem was initially inspired from a chapter in one of the poet’s books that involved a character’s loss of his beloved and subsequent death. It is paired with the next poem, Sempiternal, which, in the novel, takes off with the character’s resurrection through the power of the beloved. This is obviously a departure in the poem, as the beloved, she who gives him life beyond the eternal emptiness of the singularity, is in fact “merely” her simulacrum in his mind.
Sempiternal
The chrysalis of flesh falls free at last,
As consciousness escapes its mortal cage.
Beyond cruel paths of pain and terror passed,
We’ll write our story on a timeless page.
Her absence hollows galaxies of thought,
Each orbit empty where she once would shine.
Frail universal laws count less than naught,
Dissolved beside transcendent love divine.
If madness vomits lies that pierce death’s cloak,
May sweet delusion be my guiding star,
For reason’s grounds may break, and wisdom choke,
While truth be found within mirage bizarre.
Though worlds will fade,
And stars themselves must cease,
It matters not— she is my path to peace.
Rising from the metaphysical wreckage of Singularity, Sempiternal is about a stillborn rebirth in illusory and imaginative escape. Like the previous poem, it was inspired by a chapter in one of the poet’s books, but also took a turn to the reality of Tome of Stars. This reality is one where even delusion, the entertaining in his mind of the presence of the beloved, her mirage, is a “better” environment that facing baldly the unmaking horror of her absence. Better in the sense that his psyche can persist in an intentional dream world with her in it (however maladaptive it might be in many aspects), but cannot survive within a real world where she is gone. Thus, even should the universe end, in reality or in creating a false reality, nothing else matters but his focus on her. This is not a transient grief state, but instead a highly pathological form of a prolonged grief disorder. It resurfaces in later poems such as Oasis and Simulacrum, because it is such a constant element of the poet’s existence after the loss of the Stargirl.
San Francisco
The cliff house stands, and shore surrenders sight—
Seal rocks full hallowed, touched by ocean’s grace.
We shared a meal embraced in fairy light—
A splendorous, enchanting, sacred space.
We gazed, our eyes entranced, and servers smiled.
The world was fogged and melted from our view.
Our love—a force the room in whole beguiled—
Had glowed so bright, it dulled wide skies of blue.
Tall panoramic windows framed the scene;
The sunset draped the sea with golden lace.
A magic moment, one heart born between,
Transcendent beauty shining in your face.
And should you ever journey back to me,
I’d marry you beside that sunlit sea.
San Francisco is a flashback to the poet’s most special memory of his time with the Stargirl, a shared evening by the Pacific ocean. It is, after the previous poems, an emotional sanctuary, part of his imaginative escape, and the hope of reunion presented at the end is self-aware in its conditional nature (with “journey back to me” a near repeat of the mantra “come back to me”). The poem swings between symbolic elements (“a meal embraced in fairy light”) and real events, such as the way the couple gazed into each other’s eyes to the amusement of the serving staff. While Consummation presented an especially beautiful moment of the beloved herself (as it were, in a most terrible environment), this poem presents the pair together along with the environment, the poet’s subjective sense of reality that their bond transformed an already beautiful scene toward something transcendent.
Entangled
Nonlocal physics can’t explain this bond,
Where particles of you and I entwine.
Though ghostly distance, interactions spawned,
Our quantum hearts refuse to realign.
Each neuron integrates your image scanned—
Stark stellar map emblazoned through my brain.
Though light-years stretch between, I hold your hand;
Until my grave, your memory remains.
I strove to sail the stars to find your seas,
But every current curved away your glow,
My spirit seared and scarred by gravity,
As spacetime waves confounded where I’d go.
My life, my heart, my hope—till breath be done,
I’ll find your love amongst those distant suns.
Entangled is both a fantasy/memory of the times they were physically together as well as a consideration in personal realms of the quantum mechanical phenomenon of “ghostly action at a distance” (as Einstein put it for natural elements). After their separation, the poet feels forever tethered to the beloved, engendering in him a quest to seek connection to her through the universe of imagination, all cast in the verse with the terms of physics and cosmology. But their “quantum hearts refuse to realign.” So even as the poet feels this connection as some essential and natural law, he continuously is wounded by the loss of the beloved and their inability to reconcile (a theme central to the coming poem Rusali Radha, Rusala Madhava). The second quatrain catalogs how the beloved is imprinted upon him forever, leading to quatrain three where that imprint forces him to ever search for her as the poem concludes, never stopping despite how the universe seems to prevent their reunion.
Smile
Deep scholars’ shafts—we met entombed that day,
Her amethyst shirt, sultry and divine.
She lit the underground, a grinning fey,
Transforming shadowed corners with starshine.
Resplendent photo, treasured and embraced,
She blessed the garden; fertile flowers formed.
Her beam, the bloom that granted day its grace—
Creative glance, a galaxy newborn.
And now she gleams for all the world’s blind eyes:
In shops, on streets, her sun each stranger’s gains.
And I, her light in vain would memorize—
A goddess ghost whose visage ever wanes.
Unseeing swarms, a star you’re blessed to see,
Ne’er blinding more as when it shone for me.
The sonnet is another flashback to the resplendent nature of the beloved’s smile and its effect on the poet. He remembers specific instances when her smile seemed to magically transform his reality and laments losing it, but also laments the biological realities of time and how the only thing left to him of her, his memories, dissolve as each year passes and she fades to mere fantasy. Bitterly, he considers how random and indifferent people experience the miracle of her smile every day (“And now she gleams for all the world’s blind eyes: In shops, on streets, her sun each stranger’s gains”) as he madly clasps the threads of recall that melt through his hands (“And I, her light in vain would memorize—A goddess ghost whose visage ever wanes”). The poem ends with the poet longing for the “star” they’re “blessed to see”, recalling when he was in her orbit, and her smile was “Ne’er blinding more as when it shone for me.”
Rusali Radha, Rusala Madhava
A lovers’ quarrel now darkens Gokul’s skies,
As Radha, Krishna, hurl hurt hearts astray.
The peacocks pack their plumes with doleful cries,
As bees flee fields, and flowers fade to gray.
Bloomed creepers scorn the limbs they once embraced,
As trust that twined them tight has frayed, undone.
The moon lays hid; the morning dies disgraced.
All nature mourns in gloom the absent sun.
How long shall silent spirits seek repair?
Which dares to speak a word to pierce this night?
For all the world in sorrow waits with prayer,
Breaths held in hope to see dawn’s healing light.
My pride erased, I’ll kneel—petition first:
“Come back to me,” I plead with every verse.
This sonnet draws from a Marathi devotional song of the same name, one that the beloved performed in dance years after their separation. When the divine Radha and Krishna quarrel, there are cosmic consequences. So felt the poet when he lost the beloved, and it seemed the only way to capture both her transcendence to him and the devastation of losing her was to use hyperbole and cosmic imagery (also considered later in Grand Unification Theory). The lyrics repeat the final plea of Singularity and the promise of San Francisco, everything circling back to how the beloved herself described the piece before her dance performance: “How long will they not speak to each other? Who will speak first?” Thus, the poet could not help but wonder if she chose this piece to speak to him directly, but her response to him would shatter such naivety. And in the end with “I plead with every verse,” the poet’s subconscious confesses that the most primal, essential reason for everything he’s done in Tome of Stars, even in his current disbelief of her love, was indeed to sing a desperate song for her return.
Elephant and Mouse
You named me “elephant”; I smiled, bemused,
Endearment strange that painted me part clown.
I puzzled why that moniker you’d choose,
When other beasts wear strength with more renown.
You styled your “puppy” name like fragile lace,
A cuddled creature craving warmth and care.
Beloved, you thrived in safety’s soft embrace;
You dreamed my strength would ever guard you there.
But now I’ll call you “mouse,” my closest heart:
A clever creature, swift and rarely caught.
A dextrous, nimble sprite of prancing art,
Wild in the world, whirled dancing ever wrought.
But finding naming’s meanings I can’t do,
For meaning’s lost, I found, since losing you.
This sonnet revisits early periods of romantic intimacy in the pet names exchanged between the poet and the beloved. The tone seems light and whimsical, but the last lines show the shadow over it all, the loss of the beloved and the shattering of the existential reality for the poet. Even language is stripped of significance, self-referentially undermining everything Tome of Stars seems to be trying to do. An important note: the poet's confusion at the beloved naming him “elephant” likely stems from culture differences between an American interacting with an Indian. For him, elephants inherit strongly the American culture's portrayal of the animals as often comical and clumsy. Thus he wondered why she wouldn't choose a different animal for his nickname. For many Hindus, or those raised in Hindu culture, elephants are revered as majestic, complex symbols. They possess characteristics of strength and divinity, even sensuality (e.g., through Ganesha, the elephant-headed god).
Karuna
Are grief, compassion, kindred—or divorced?
On western shores, the sages draw a line:
For anguished spirits oft rebuff kind course,
While saints, with pity, dance a joy divine.
In eastern art, where grief and mercy meet,
Shall sorrow build a bridge between two souls.
For what is pathos in performance sweet,
If none are moved to heal, remaining cold?
In seas of pain, my sinking ship near keels,
And so I seek to summon from your heart
Deep sympathy—but might it cut like steel?
Cruel pity only splits our bond apart.
My lasting heartache bleeds from loss of you;
Thus only through your love might life renew.
This sonnet contemplates the nature of compassion, focusing on possible distinctions between Western and Indian conceptions of emotional responses to suffering in the context of art. It examines the gap between abstract compassion and embodied, restorative care. The poem references karuna, a central tenet in Indian spiritual thought, contrasting it with more distanced or cerebral Western responses to grief. The final lines turn to the poet's pain, and show that the entire debate in his mind is centered on the very real suffering he feels and the healing he only imagines is possible from the beloved. He also distinguishes between “cruel pity” that “might cut like steel” and “her love.” The former is based on “feeling sorry” for someone, but what he needs to be truly healed, so that “life renew,” is the fullness of her affection.
Pathless Lands
Each day grants gifts I long to gift away,
And decades drift, like windswept petals, gone.
The years bleed by, as memories decay,
Our time together fades, like frost at dawn.
Joan Baez introduced to me a song,
A verse in Basque, adorned with folk-strummed strings.
The meaning cuts through yearning, sharp and strong.
The melody soars sweet on timeless wings.
On ivory keys, I played that soulful tune,
With strings, I spun a sound of wind and rain.
Like birdsong, bright beneath a pregnant moon,
I sang to you a lover’s scarred refrain.
Love’s not a trade where equal debts are paid,
But freely given, never to be weighed.
This sonnet melds three themes: the inexorable erosion of memory over time, non-possessive love (as expressed in the next sonnet that concludes Senescence, Txoria Txori, the song he mentions singing in this sonnet), and Jiddu Krishnamurti’s words about possession and love:
“Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something – and it is only such love that can know freedom.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti, Think on These Things
Here the poet is beginning to enter into an emotional realm later to be fully explored in Quixotosis and Scripture, namely the state of loving while being denied love in return, and, in fact, receiving insult, hatred, and neglect. Here it is only a proto-state, a sentiment felt strongly and presented in the concluding couplet. Later, it becomes a way of life as the poet finds himself, quite imperfectly, walking a path to an adoration devoid of return, acknowledgment, or respect (from any quarter). Poems such as Mangalam and Bridge of Bones tackle this topic from experiential and existential perspectives, respectively.
Txoria Txori
A bird celestial soared through mortal planes,
With starswept wings, embracing galaxies.
Her feathers, nebular in astral rains.
Her song slung sirens weeping to their knees.
She danced in graceful charm, and Shiva paused,
Entranced; he watched her waltzing through the airs.
But I, a mortal marred by monsters’ claws,
Lay trapped by chains of darkness and despair.
My madness hurt the bird—her chanting failed.
Ignoring all my pleas, she turned to fly.
A knife I clasped to clip her wings, but quailed:
In sacrilege, thus would her nature die.
To love her was to loose her spirit free;
To keep her was to lose her lastingly.
Txoria Txori is a Basque poem first and then song that tells the story of a person thinking to clip a beloved bird's wings to prevent it from flying away. They realize that this would destroy the nature of the bird, one of the very things central to their love of the creature. In Basque culture, this work represents often more than simple emotional possession, but can extend even to the nature of a people and their identity.
The sonnet of the same name in Tome of Stars is a reimagining of the original through the lens of the poet's life and grief. He blends the essence of the original poem with aspects of worshipful love, human flaws, and relationship decay. His own desperation and madness in losing the beloved are mirrored in the protagonist of the original song, although the poet never once attempted to restrain his beloved. It ties back to Pathless Lands and the nature of love vs possession.
One thing the poet could never say, which distressed the beloved, was that there was any ownership of her on his part. While this may have been a fundamental conflict and distinction in their natures, for him it was immutable: he loved her too much to even entertain the idea of ownership. It was simply not even a concept that made sense to him. She would be with him because she so chose or not at all.
This did not mean he was okay with her leaving him – it is very much the opposite as Tome of Stars should make clear. But he would accept his own personal annihilation in losing her rather than dream of trying to constrain her. He might beg in his moments of anguish (“come back to me” as in Singularity and Rusali Radha, Rusala Madhava). He might cry out. He might and likely will die in the darkness of her singularity. But in the end, he would watch and wait, because for him, a core truth he could not deny or erase, is that “to love her was to loose her spirit free.”