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Two Poems by Robin Mookerjee

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When Robin Mookerjee died last year, in May 2016, he left behind a considerable amount of unpublished writing, including poems and short stories. Lucy Mookerjee, Robin’s wife, has given Colette Brooks and Mark Statman the work for publication.

The two poems featured here embody qualities that marked Robin’s writing and being.  As Statman observes, “They are dark and witty, intelligent, wise, a little smart-alecky but in a way that is at once forgiving and generous, even kind.”  As was Robin himself.

 

​Cyrillic Diary

Haven’t slept since Inverness

Lapping and narcotic shores, ways to fall

Tor I hadn’t seen in a while

Next to our finger-dances, sublime‑

I no longer recall.

 

Kindly I sprinkled water on you again

You slept like a child with belly fever

Brown-eyed moons shone in the reservoir

Anchored  me to the sky‑

Made of me a believer.

 

Maps smoothed out on my library table

Lost you with the invention of the steam engine

Riadh through to South Korea

Every port a new bed‑

A dream each destination.

 

Rainbow Table

​(for my wedding)

 

You are or you were the green liquid,

bubbles up & down cylindrical translucent housing;

but that’s just a mental thing.

 

You are all over me like the microscopic dust that parachutes down,

invisible cloud from the new towers & the ones we’ve known a long time –

proof from regret or foresight,

 

transports itself from you to me via the skin trade, and

with a parlance in which we are not conversant;

and accounts for all knowledge held in common between us.

 

So it goes: that which is most essential, elixir or quintessence, is

intangible, not found in Diderot or Johnson, compilers of known things.

It is of the rays and gases, atmospheric stuff, rumored to embower, conspiring to

 

maintain life or cue death to reappear as life.

So it is: we live, happily, in a world of things, distributing autumnal leaves

like immigration papers, oblivious yet versed in knowledge of the law,

 

unacknowledged arbiters of the nicest adjustments that

forestall daily calamity, doing God’s work with idle hands, which we

now will do under the auspices of this architecture and augury ad infinitum.

 

 

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When Robin Mookerjee died last year, in May 2016, he left behind a considerable amount of unpublished writing, including poems and short stories. Lucy Mookerjee, Robin’s wife, has given Colette Brooks and Mark Statman the work for publication.

The two poems featured here embody qualities that marked Robin’s writing and being.  As Statman observes, “They are dark and witty, intelligent, wise, a little smart-alecky but in a way that is at once forgiving and generous, even kind.”  As was Robin himself.

 

​Cyrillic Diary

Haven’t slept since Inverness

Lapping and narcotic shores, ways to fall

Tor I hadn’t seen in a while

Next to our finger-dances, sublime‑

I no longer recall.

 

Kindly I sprinkled water on you again

You slept like a child with belly fever

Brown-eyed moons shone in the reservoir

Anchored  me to the sky‑

Made of me a believer.

 

Maps smoothed out on my library table

Lost you with the invention of the steam engine

Riadh through to South Korea

Every port a new bed‑

A dream each destination.

 

Rainbow Table

​(for my wedding)

 

You are or you were the green liquid,

bubbles up & down cylindrical translucent housing;

but that’s just a mental thing.

 

You are all over me like the microscopic dust that parachutes down,

invisible cloud from the new towers & the ones we’ve known a long time –

proof from regret or foresight,

 

transports itself from you to me via the skin trade, and

with a parlance in which we are not conversant;

and accounts for all knowledge held in common between us.

 

So it goes: that which is most essential, elixir or quintessence, is

intangible, not found in Diderot or Johnson, compilers of known things.

It is of the rays and gases, atmospheric stuff, rumored to embower, conspiring to

 

maintain life or cue death to reappear as life.

So it is: we live, happily, in a world of things, distributing autumnal leaves

like immigration papers, oblivious yet versed in knowledge of the law,

 

unacknowledged arbiters of the nicest adjustments that

forestall daily calamity, doing God’s work with idle hands, which we

now will do under the auspices of this architecture and augury ad infinitum.