“Lady with a Dog” by Akshaya Pawaskar

After Lady with a Dog at Her Feet after Edmond Aman-Jean (1910) by Timothy Cole

He digs up an old carcass.
She has closet full of skeletons
which sing to her interminably.
Bones are flutes,
soothing to hear dry to touch.
He smells a cancer.
Her regrets are festering
multiplying like
cells that infiltrate and
occupy spaces
not meant for them.
He sniffs death.
She smells the rotting of dream,
one cannot live on dying ones.
He predicts an earthquake
She is slow dancing into
the cracks of earth, disappearing.
He sniffs a seizure.
Her soul is twitching senseless
trapped in a torpid body.
If you listen to someone
for a stretch of time
you end up talking like them.
Some days she sounds like her dog.
On most days she sounds like silence.
In her dreams the wind is always
Pink, her steed black and
her breeches brown.
When no one is watching
she is unbridled like art
riding into the sunset.
When sitting for a portrait
a slouch appears
weighed down by a head
full of wishes that
need airing.
By palm full of fate
that needs a fresh reading.
But she stays with her shadow
for even a spoonful of love
is enough to give
her life a meaning.