Tristesse I Menard of my uncharted cavern-heart; high priest of that tristesse which I profess at depths perhaps deceptively abstruse: embalm the bruise-barred sky that lies beyond; administer the sting of vacancy, and wash me in the wake that dreams bequeath when, having over-promised, they make off abrupt across the jilted, jolted dawn. In other words, please show me what I am, or rather what it is I think I am, or rather what I think I'd rather be. II Amid your tongue-tip-twisting anagrams of certain former worlds and phantom ones, there loom and gleam all vast and vespertine the follies of a future unattained. That is, a largeness not just lost, misplaced, but never to be found, and therefore past, a wild surmise, or wink thereof, no more. Its shadows weigh like cromlechs on the ground and brook no trespass from the daunted realm of what are said to be the living, leaving only some officious effigy, a station-master maybe -- vague, remote -- to look out with a blindness interposed at new and cryptic tidelines which bear down like nightfall on a revolution quelled. III Just when I think that I have gone and found the More I try to seek but can't express, the reverb haze of déjà vu descends and summers past unmask themselves at last as stokers of the embers in my brain. I know that I could wait and wait and wait, as though for martlets fixed in viewless flight, but they, those summers, cleared and packed away -- well, they are never coming back again. Besides, if truth be told, it seems to me that in the end, when all is said, and said, your squares of squares can only kill the Thing, which -- concretised as well as travertined, ensnared, diminished, wan -- is soon exposed as, synchronously, propagule and host of that which I had thought I ached to flee. Thus trapped, denied, defrauded, I am left, or feel I'm left, with nothing very much: an orphan longing -- spinster-knowledge -- this? The upshot is my ochre-misted soul stands no less arid, no less desolate, than your piazzas as they echo in the gloaming. Sanjeev Braich Sanjeev Braich is, or perhaps at some deep level longs to be, no more than a writer manqué. He lives and works in London.
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The Ekphrastic Review
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February 2025
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