POEM: Corpuscules in Corners

I want to work back to that intuition I had of the infinity of the self— that this world is bursting at its seams and margins with the divine. Is coming home to oneself like turning from ashes and ashes to dust in corners?

POEM: Corpuscules in Corners
Bambina che gioca su un tappeto rosso by Felice Casorati (1912)

Corpuscules in Corners
by Kuyili Karthik

I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.
– Pierre de Fermat

The old and the young play at mischief.
Middling adults labour under the misapprehension
that they are divisible parts
of an indifferent structure.
They cower for the promise of cowries
in corridors narrow and familiar.

A child finds miracles collecting in corners
like dust unswept for years.
Cobwebs span walls that converge
like the parted pages of a book
imparting divinity in spines of shadow.

I found respite in the classroom
by sharpening pencils
into a dustbin behind the door.
Each shave was a meditation on graphite,
my own temple spire
that crumbled when I’d write.

Krishna held the universe
in the cavity of his mouth.
Might my utterances also taste
of that dark syrup of truth?
I used to eat the dust
that layered soft and grey
in felted nooks:
wafers of dead skin,
dirt and detritus underfoot.

My teacher who terrorised
was tortured by trivialities.
Her wooden ruler struck terror
upon knuckled fists.
Our sins were hemmed in
by its margins.

Shylock wanted
to cut a chunk
from the guilty flesh that owed him,
but you cannot carve a pound
form the wealth of the whole
without disfiguring it.
We are divisible only
through the pipette
of man's mind.

My blind grandmother taught me
how to look at the sun
the way the Vedic yogis did.
I saw through my fingers,
interlaced against the sky,
a little square of light
bordered by skin.
If I took down my veneer,
perhaps I’d be too blinded
to catch a glimpse of the divine.

I want to run the risk--
split the stasis of endings
and unfold into the horizon.
We try to splice
a fraction of a fraction
of the richness of the world
but lacerate its tapestry.
Are we really cut from the same cloth?
I wove myself in,
dissolving into the web.
Shavasana,
the sinking death of ego
easing into the ebb of dissipation.