Reflections on a Bar of Soap By: Sambhu Ramachandran

3 a.m. The kiss of cold bathroom tiles

on the soles of my feet. The faucet

turns on with a death rattle,

and the Fibonacci sequence of water

makes the bucket run over. The wet bar

of Dove soap, worn thin by rounding

the hairpin bends of your body, unites

the palpability of my skin with your absence.

I can almost detect the imbibed throbbing

of your heart through its half-centimetre

thickness like one still hears the music

an amputee-musician makes. As it glides

over my face, a landscape of snow

slowly takes shape. Now my eyes

are igloos and my moustache the last

trace of the Atlantic walrus hunted

to near extinction. The showerhead

unleashes a pine forest of water

that washes your transferred touch

off me. But what can erase the palimpsest

of caresses not visible to the eye?

When I put back the soap in the celadon dish

signed thankfully with a strand of my hair,

I feel your long fingers slipping out of mine.

Sambhu Ramachandran is a bilingual poet, translator, short story writer, and academic

from Kerala, India, who turns to poetry as a means of interpreting the chaos of life and

making it both bearable and beautiful in its transience. He is currently working as Assistant

Professor of English at N.S.S. College, Pandalam. His poems have been repeatedly

anthologized in The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English. They have also appeared in The

Bombay Literary Magazine (TBLM), Wild Court, Madras Courier, The Alipore Post, Muse

India, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Setu, and The Chakkar, among others.

Authors Notes: The poem was prompted by a rumination on the role played by material objects in structuring human relationships. Every object whose use is shared, like a bed, a bath towel, or a bar of soap, encodes the secret history of intimacy. They imbibe a part of us in being constantly used, and come to reflect our personalities in the way they feel, in the warmth they retain, and in the unique scents they exude. Always carrying traces of the bodies and lives that touch them, they hold memory and presence long after the moment of use has passed.