Unasked, as the day
declined, she brought out her small
breasts, to be caressed.

We do not know what haiku is? What does the poet mean to say? Is it about haiku and haiku-writing or something as sexual or a carnal silhouette? What is it? How to lay it bare the hidden meaning? Is art so erotic and pornographic and what it the wish of an artist? Nude photos? Is this art? Is this poetry? Love for nudity is modern art and so is love for nudity in poetry.

To read the poem is to be remember the Konark Sun-temple and the Khajuraho group of temples, the sculptures and figurines inscribed on the outer walls. The clay-baked plates on the outer walls of the terracotta temples, decorating the panels and columns too can be put before as for a picturesque penetration. Man-woman relationship, the age-old story of passionate and impulsive relationship may be the story. The Lingam-Yoni motif, the Purusha-Prakriti concept and the libido have been used in put it briefly. What it the heart of the matter! The dark matter! How our darker emotions of love? What do we feel it within?

How our kaama, vasana and ashakti, sexual feeling, latent lustrous desire and infatuation for? Why is love so possessive and bodily and darker? How the creational aspect? How meek the feminine sensibility? Nissim too is not innocent.To read the poem is to talk of Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gypsy and The Fox and Sun; to read the poem is to talk of Joyce’s Araby where the drunken man and woman keep talking into the dark lanes and spaces of the closed fair and the author without having purchased for the friend’s sister returning back from. To think it otherwise, it is just like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man not, but of a woman in miniature as for beautification purpose. Maybe it a type of The Portrait of a Lady otherwise as for the sake of artistic presentation. Tennyson’s The Beggar Maid and Blake’s London can be sampled together with the readings of Kamala Das. There is something of Jayanta Mahapatra’s Hunger in it.

Vatsyayana’s Kamsuttra would have better had he gone into the footsteps. Nissim is sexual and bodily. The love of the body leaves him not behind. Flesh and blood is wiser than intellect is the Lawrentine thing which he feels it drawn to always. Possessive love is the pleasure held so secretly. The body he has known it, not the soul of man.