Poems by ​Arundhathi Subramaniam 

 
 The Way You Arrive
 
The way your words reach me,
phantom-walking
through all these tensile,
suspicious membranes of self.
 
The way you unclog
these streets and by-lanes
so I can surge
through starshine and aqueduct,
the luminous canals of a world
turned Venetian.
 
The way you enter
and the day’s events scatter
like islands in the sea.
 
The way you arrive.



You and I that Day in Florence
(for Gayatri)
 
What were we seeking that supple
radiant day when
 
a medieval city rearranged
its geography, kodaked itself
 
at several degrees to the sun?
What were we seeking,
 
two poets in the mood
to get lost, as a world
 
unravelled graciously –
bridge, cobbled street and canal, careless
 
effusion of silhouetted cathedral,
the endless melancholy
 
of the Arno, and the shimmer
of trade on the Ponte Vecchio?
 
We asked for coffee with a frisson
of alcohol. We asked for just one man
 
(and there were many)
who looked like Al Pacino.
 
But that endless autumn day in the year 2000
it was enough to participate
 
in this great elsewhere, to be included
in a page from the library books
 
of our childhood, crisp, transfigured
by burnt dreamlight. It was enough (remember?)
 
to be part of the picture. 

About the poet

Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning poet and writer on spirituality and culture. Winner of the inaugural Khushwant SIngh Memorial Prize for Poetry in January 2015, the Raza Award for Poetry and the  International Piero Bigongiari Prize, she is the author of four works of poetry, two works of prose and an editor of several anthologies on poetry and spirituality. Widely translated and anthologized, her most recent book of poems, When God is a Traveller (2014) was shortlisted for the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize. As prose writer, she is the author of The Book of Buddha and the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life.