OneWhen I speak to you, my chest is the bank of some well-travelled river, where they come to sing, the poets, those ones who, we learn, dealt with love and verse as if they were weighing life and death.TwoYour voice wakes the bird in its cage inside my ribs and without hesitation, it spouts a verse about rain on hills waiting to sprout.ThreeYour absence, to me, beloved, is like that king’s question to the wise ones. He turned love-play, and love and romance, into a riddle that had to be unlocked by a turn of words. He asked about one thing, but was in fact asking about something else. He asked, that king, of a bee, flying thither hither, can you say, if women’s hair – his face still bearing the artful fragrances of the queen’s black-as-bees tresses – had a natural intoxicating smell. And since bee languagewas beyond him, he repeated this doubt, artificed into verse, to the wise ones. To me, this verse asks the only questionthat lovers – no matter whether they talk of this or that, or of nothing – ever ask: Are you really mine? Can you really be mine?FourThose noble ones, they knew how the absence of one of two lovers could change everything to nothing. So they said, when she cannot come to meet him: no stars, no moon, no sun or rain-clouds in the sky. No skyFiveShe dreamed of the meeting with him – even the colours on the forest trees under which he would wait. But it was not to be – she could not leave home. They tell us the wind was strong that night; and the next morning, the lily-pond in her garden covered in hill-tree leaves.Excerpted with permission from ‘What She Says When She’s Teaching Sangam Poets and He Asks Her To Write Like Them, How She Loves Him’ in Boundary Commissions: Love Poems, Kala Krishnan, Westland.