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.