A Picnic

Rhododendron-smell hangs like an old French empire,

(almost as decadent as old Baudelaire

would have approved) down the slopes,

near the water stream and by the main road in a valley

in Sikkim north, to ultimately die

for the picnickers’ sweet petrol smoke

Picnic - a two-note birdcall

from the woods,

as though a Beethoven cover-artist wakes up

again, in spring

and sets the score for a cuckoo in falling major third

for his forthcoming pastoral

to be staged in Sikkim

We contribute

like the classical socialists to indulge

in a collective merriment

because we haven’t smelt so much fragrance, such acute

otherness for many months

It tries to remind us of Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’ herbe:

a female nude 

and a scantily dressed female bather on a picnic

with two fully dressed men in a rural setting,

profane yet interesting

Since then, we have learnt to forbid ourselves

from our own smell - the armpits and the heady smell

of our mistakes

in a pastoral setting though each one of us

is the last attestant

of something disappearing — rustle of leaves, the impressionist

spring, a ritual of feast, a sigh, the decadent sunlight,

a fragrance, our mauve desires,

some failed ways of life