Unopenable Shoebox

Mourning aurochs & passenger

pigeons, we nurse dreams to bring

them back through de-extinction.

Could I bring us back that way?

Splice this orchid you once inked

pink on the back of a Vietnamese

Dong bank note worth two cents

twenty years ago with this shard

of mesh torn from the black garter

you used to wear, which I imagine

still smells faintly of you if I ration

the number of times I unearth it

from this shoebox hidden away

until I’ve forgotten that it exists.

It’s a genetic scrapheap floating

in another dimension, the pieces

of the life we could have lived

and the one where we snuck up

to moonlit rooftops wherever

we were so you could photograph

the wooden water towers from

a bygone gas lamp era, then fall

into me on precipices under over-

hangs above a stream of traffic.

Perhaps there’s some conjunction

of archaic units of measurement,

a distance briefer than the barley-

corn, more sustained than the spat,

brighter than a sun’s candlepower,

buried far deeper by fathoms

in memory than anything on earth.

That’s the distance between us now.

Pushcart-prize-winning poet, Dr. Ravi Shankar is the author / translator / editor of 17 books, including the Memoir Magazine and Connecticut Book Award finalist “Correctional,” the Muse India-award winning translations of Andal, “The Autobiography of a Goddess,” and W.W. Norton & Co’s “Language for a New Century,” called “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Caravan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and on the BBC, NPR, and the PBS Newshour. He founded Drunken Boat, one of the world’s oldest electronic journals of the arts, has won residencies and fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, been featured at Ubud and the Jaipur Literary Festival, given a TEDx talk on #impuritanthinking and currently teaches creative writing for the New York Writers Workshop and at Tufts University.