Rasa

Ethereal wine pours on the wind…

A bouquet of intuitions

Within the glass of air, 

The wind across the arc of hills

Brimming over you 
In a surfeit of endless nuances.

The sound of your steps

Upon the crushing of leaves

Flows down an uncorked path of sunlight,

Their sound tilting your shadow toward that threshold

In which legs decant upon the earth,

Emptying into distance

As here overflows into there

And never stops pouring,

Never stops vanishing and transforming

As it is imbibed

In the aroma of fields of wildflowers.

Looking up through a lattice of pine branches

That spiral into the sky,

White clouds seem  to dangle in clusters

Like wine grapes above the trees,

Their sweetness almost tasted. 

With  the needles 

They make a wine, imperceptible,

Swallowing the senses.

At the edge of their faintest fragrance

Gathers a sense of ancient certainty within the air.

You come beside a whispering stream 

Engulfed in a cooling breeze whose murmurations 

Are like the deep whispers of all the lovers

Whoever left a secret in your ear.

A thousand reflections of branches rippling on it,

Thoughts like fallen leaves saturated

With the sentiments passing between things,

All the water pouring downstream

Inclined into the throat of sky.

As a wind like wine upon your lips 

Blows with a hundred poems yet begun,

A moment taken in a sip of complete silence

From a chalice made of the language of birds,

All silence acknowledging itself in their songs,   

And enabled to hear for a second clouds move, the hills breathe.

Words you can’t put your fingers on,

This ineffable essence, this rasa

This taste that tickles your tongue with words

You can’t quite speak

As the perpetual moment alludes to you, and yet passes

Into memory, faint and ephemeral.

The subtle pangs of everything before your eyes,

Its inexpressible meaning a feeling untranslatable,

A concentrated nectar within a blink 

That reopens to confront you with yourself and beauty.

A moment like stars that are always in the sky, but concealed ...

Drinking the heady Spirit there

The combination of essences that ferment in the winery casks

Of the ethers, precipitations of light spiraling into countless vessels

Inhaled by the vision.

All of this just a fleeting taste of what is truly there

This surfeit of the unknowable, this rasa.

Stones sing as buried harps and dragonflies hum like flutes

This untranslatable essence, this rasa

Like memories of their embrace

Redolent in these winds and whispers,

A hug and a kiss holding you still 

In Indian aesthetics,  Rasa literally means "nectar, essence or taste". It is a concept in Indian arts denoting the aesthetic flavour of any visual, literary or musical work that evokes an emotion or feeling in the reader or audience, but cannot be described.