Corridor Poem by Bipin Patsani

"A picture is an adventure each time.
When I tackle the white canvas
I never know how it will come out."
- George Braque

Words float like boats in the void,
Coming out of the womb of imagination.
Charles Strickland and I sat talking
While time went on slipping.
Someone said, "Sail on the boat you like
To go out of the boat.
Go out sailing to the unknown
Kaleidoscopic island of your dream
In the heaving boundary of a body
That tries to possess, but in vain."

Strickland and I came to an understanding.
And we agreed - The body is a green corridor,
A bridge to go beyond.

So it came,
One day I saw the nudes in "The Bathers"
Of Renoir and "La Source" of Ingress
And found that they were all poetry.
II
The picture is yet to start
And the blank outlines of the canvas
Widen to spread all over the Universe.
What shall I paint, O speak! What shall I paint?
Let me be a zero and clamp on to the canvas.
Make me a handful of dust
And throw me into the stream of creatrix,
That I may come out fresh.

III

Must the artist be isolated for his creative reticence?
What is it that pulls me down?
See how I get entangled in the wiry web of imbalance
Slipping, sliding down deep into Cocytus,
The ghost in me frightening my whole being.

People come and go casting headless looks
To the softness within
Beneath the hard outer surface of the skin
And underneath I die unseen searching for me,
Searching for my identity in my entity.
But where is the real me?

O route infinite to my indefinite voyage!
I am married to you suffering,
I embrace you with the warmth and ecstasy
Of the wedding night.
Come, let me see what is that you hide.
In you I see all the beautiful maidens
Sunk in the lake of my eyes.
In you I see all those I did not see
And those who escaped my vision;
The blooming smile of the virgin withering
From her lilac lips, the smile of the timid bride,
And dead and doubtful,
The smile of children learning to beg.

In you I see love, sex, war, birth, death and horror.
Flood, famine and hunger I see, I see in you terror.
Faces and figures lose their identity
In the vastness of space,
And molecules clinging together into forms
Melt again in a usual process.

What there is on the canvas I don't know.
What is there? Is it a warm silken net
Capturing beauty in its lively frame
That tries to escape but never does?

Is it the Word eternal, transcendental,
Floating on the blue blank ocean
Of the canvas where nothing is visible,
Nothing except the invisible that flames
All words, all voices and images around it?

Of whom shall I paint? The grass is a great god
As well as the ant and the mountain.
The spring and the volcano flow
In their own ways to unite the poles.
So let me leave the canvas as it is;
Let me leave dots and circles, circles and dots behind me.
Let me write zero a million times and die looking at them.
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