Homage to the Square

You loved the squareness of square,
the hardness of it, its resistance
to symbolism.

But a thousand squares
is a kind of tenderness,
don’t you think?

Square is earth,
is ground, is pura, is prithvi,
is everything we stand on,

is no ambiguity,
is perimeter, is geometry,
is where I place my feet, my head.

You loved colours because they lie,
because they make you see what you want to see.
You say firm and wild

and I see a saffron cube,
which is actually my father.
You say warmth and softness,

and I see clouds, or are they wildebeest?
Charging into forest with muscles
I thought were extinct. Sartorius, gracilis.

Electrical storms. No. Wings. No.
The unbearable suppleness of door hinges.
All descriptions are pedestrian.

You stand at the boundary, holding a sign:
This way to Squaredom. And it is nothing
we understand square to be today –

limited, hemmed in, conservative.
Instead – draw up, draw up from these squares
the heavy containment of earth.

It has been sitting there so long, waiting
for your toes to make contact. The reliability
of mud. It flows upwards, through bodies,

through heads, into sky, which is not a square,
darling, but the roof that has always been above
and around us, a generous goblet of blue.