Gait by Biman Roy

after Danielle Mitchell

Sometimes it’s hard to find your gait. Even if you know it, you can’t place a finger on it. Is it straight or crooked, halting or free-flowing, plantar or astral? You are not sure. Sometimes it’s like knowing another body, naked and close, fold by fold, breath by breath, like surveying a wooded land where your red Pontiac has stopped on its own, still snow on ground, a decrepit cabin nearby with a blind man and an insomniac dog in it. You keep fumbling, lots to see, lots to measure—like the day measuring its light, earth measuring its shadows. Then a man emerges with an olive uniform, takes out his gun, and shoots the blind man. You recede back and then lurch forward and ask yourself, What should be my gait? No one knows. No one will know as you have to invent it like a castle on the lake finds the faces of glory and misery floating side by side. If you ask about your gait, the man on a bicycle will cut through it, the woman with the straw hat and pink ribbon will float through it and they will say, yes, it’s your gait, it’s transparent and peaceful as moments after orgasm or after the coffin is out through the door.

Biman Roy has been writing poetry for past three decades and has been published in various literary journals in US, UK, Canada and India.

*Photo by Alejandro Escamilla