Perfect Image

by Ankur Betageri (December 2015)

In Delhi’s liver there is no calm.

Hum of AC, rattling of fan.

Eyes shut up like inside a clam—

Then a chance-glance out the window

the pupil’s dazzled by a disc in sky.

Sun—O how it peels the brain

and the last layers of the feeling—I.

I am what I have been transfixed by.

And out of the alchemy I spread

like dawn’s blush comes to be the sky.

I am what I will be, from what the world has been.

I gaze at the world become me, and me the world.

It’s the perfect image—there’s neither see-er nor seen.

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Ankur Betageri (b.1983) is poet, short fiction writer and visual artist based in New Delhi. His published works include The Bliss and Madness of Being Human (poetry, 2013) and Bhog and Other Stories (short fiction, 2010).

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