Fragments
from Illiterate Heart (Triquarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2002)

I start to write fragments
as much to myself as to another.

(Who lives in my mind?
Can the mind hold its hope?)

I want to write:
The trees are bursting into bloom.

I felt it, though it did not come
in that particular way, the sentence endstopped.

Could sense come in feverish script
finicky with rhyme, sharp as a wave?

Or was that the wrong way around?
The hold of things was perpetually askew,

hard as I tried to figure it through:
a branch surprisingly stout

thrust out of the main trunk
level with my ankle,

the slash in it bright gentian,
cupped in a bracelet of dew.

Rites of Sense
from Illiterate Heart (Triquarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2002)

In twilight as she lies on a mat
I rub my mother's feet with jasmine oil
touch callouses under skin,
joints upholding that fraught original thing--
bone, gristle skin, all that makes her mine.
All day she swabbed urine from the floor,
father's legs so weak he clung to the rosewood bed.
She rinsed soiled cloths, hung them out to dry
on a coir rope by a vine, its passion fruit
clumsy with age, dangling.

She lies on a mat, a poor thing beached,
belly slack, soles crossed, sari damp and white.
I kneel in darkness at her side,
her oldest child returned for a few weeks
at summer's height.
She murmurs my name
asks in Malayalam Why is light so hot?

Beyond her spine I catch a candle glisten.
The door's a frame for something
I'm too scared to name:
a child, against a white wall,
hands jammed to her teeth, lips torn
breath staggering its hoarse silence.

All night my voice laced through dreams
tiny eyelets for the smoke
Amma, I am burning!
I'm a voice slit from sound,
just snitches of blood, loopholes of sweat,
a sack of flesh you shut me in.

What words of passage to that unlit place?
What rites of sense?

Amma, I am dreaming myself into your body.
It is the end of everything.
Your pillow stained with white
tosses as a wave might
on our southern shore.

Will you lay your cheek against mine?
Bless my bent head?

You washed me once, gave me suck,
made me live in your father's house
taught me to wake at dawn,
sweep the threshold clean of blood red leaves.
Showed me a patch of earth dug with your hands
where sweet beans grow coiled and raw.

Taught me to fire a copper pan,
starch and fold a sari, raise a rusty needle,

stitch my woman's breath
into the mute amazement of sentences.

Bengali Market
from Raw Silk (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2004)

Dear Mr. Gandhi
It was cold the day the masjid
was torn down stone by stone,
colder still at the heart of Delhi

Ten years later entering Bengali market
I saw a street filled with bicycles
girls with rushing hair, boys in bright caps
I heard a voice cry

Can you describe this?
It sounded like a voice
from a city crusted with snow
to the far north of the Asian continent.

I saw him then, your grandson
in a rusty three wheeler
wrapped up in what wools he could muster.
Behind him in red letters

a sign: Dr. Gandhi’s Clinic.
So he said, embracing me, you’ve come back.
Then pointing to the clinic --
Its not that I’m sick

that gentleman gets my mail and I his.
That is why I am perched in this contraption.
I cannot stay long, it is Id ul Fitr.
I must greet friends in Old Delhi, wish them well.

Later he sought me out in dreams.
in a high kitchen in sharp sunlight
dressed in a khadi kurta, baggy jeans.
He touched my throat in greeting.

Listen my sweet, for half of each year,
after the carriage was set on fire
after the Gujarat killings,
I disappear into darkness..

In our country there are two million dead
and more for whom no rites were said.
No land on earth can bear this.
Rivers are criss-crossed with blood.

All day I hear the scissor bird cry
cut cut cut cut cut
It is the bird Kalidasa heard
as he stood singing of buried love.

Now our boys and girls take
flight on rusty bicycles.
Will we be cured? I cried
And he: We have no tryst with destiny.

My hands like yours are stained
with the juice of the pomegrante.
Please don’t ask for my address.
I am in and out of Bengali market.

[ listen to mp3 file of poem from Rattapallax magazine ]

Raw Silk
from Raw Silk (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2004)

l.
Open the door or I’ll faint hearing amma’s voice –
Where is the silk from your grandmother’s sari?

Raw silk
brought all the way from Varanasi.

In another life I crouched on the stone floor reading poetry
-- Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit...

cette paisible rumeur-la that sort of the thing
and the town was literally blazing –

guns, grenades, blisters of smoke
on market place and mosque.

Through the bars of a white washed school room
Verlaine peering, above his head a palm tree cradling the sun.

Far from Kerala amma fed me tales --
After her wedding, years after the Salt March

grandmother coaxed mulberries
from monsoon soil, clouds ran riot

silkworms coiled under the skin of leaves
berries dripped free

the courtyard was a sea of blood.
When grandmother died

the wedding sari with its brocade
saved from the bonfire Gandhi had ordained.

was wrapped in muslin
set in a wardrobe, the door locked tight

ll.

Child, its bad enough to be in a desert land
why mutter poems in a language I can’t understand?

How could I say that in the sandstorm
I heard Verlaine singing,

Rimbaud setting fire to a felucca,
by the Mahdi’s palace

syllables run amuk,
Gordon’s head nodding on a stake

as red dates clustered
on the bough of immortality,

hence poems I committed to memory
flute music guiding me through the vertigo of history.

I wept in sorrow I could scarcely bear
for a mother killed on the street

a girl child pinned to a bed
as ancient hands cut at her.

and smoke rose from an island in the Nile
where bricks were baked for insurrection.

Should I cast it all away
be the girl who can’t remember?

Could I have uttered what I didn’t know --
when silk comes out of the silkworm’s hole

it is the color of colostrum.
It was Khartoum and it was not.

O inwardness its own reward
as the sun rises on the city of God.lll.

Amma there are silkworms
dancing in the firmament

above your head and mine
and the mother of worms

doffs her veil
and darkens her lips

and sets a crown
of mulberry leaves on my head.

When I open the drawer
to search for silk

I touch smoke,
raw silk turned to smoke in the night’s throat.

Letters to Gandhi
from Raw Silk (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2004)

Slow Dancing

Dear Mr. Gandhi
please say something
about the carnage in your home state.

How did you feel when they shut
the gates of Sabermati Ashram
that February night

and the wounded clung outside?
What has happened to ahimsa?
Is it just for the birds and the bees?

What lips, what soles
swarmed across the river?
Is it hot on the other side?

O so many questions sir,
I cannot help myself
I cannot shut my mouth.

Its hard to hear you,
birds peck at sounds
maggots gnaw since

even syllables have skin.
The kingdom of heaven
is tiny as a mustard seed

and you have crawled therein.
Mist pours from mango trees,
the moon soars in a sea of blood.

I see you at the rim of heaven
grown older still, bewildered, stooped
dhoti flecked with drops of mud,

face seared by a moon
that has nothing
except its own inhuman glow,

the archipelago of light
afloat in monsoon air
where souls frail as pin pricks go.

Dear Mr. Gandhi
please talk to me now.
I am slow dancing

in the the dark
with the untimely dead
and that is all I know.

August 14, 2004
(In Memory of Czeslaw Milosz, 1911-2004)
From Quickly Changing River (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2008)

I have never been to Krakow,
I imagine it filled with chestnut trees.

It was a green day when you died and hard the telling of it,
Now is the time for patience.

The west is a knot of thundershowers,
The east, a nest of small scale fires.
On terraces covered with roses

Instead of honey bees, bullets swarm.
In alleyways torn silk reveals the bodies of infants
Laid head to toe in caskets of desire.

On a dresser made of mahogany
A woman’s hand arranges a display of attar,
Each vial culled from a separate continent --
Jasmine, lilac, rose -- last of all, attar of earth,

Red earth in pouring rain,
August 14th in the year of the Lord, 2004.

Was it wet in Krakow when you died?
Through airport lounges and shuttered doors,

Through coast lines gashed by mist
Through barricades of blunt words,

Torment of the ant and ox,
In a miserable century with its corrupt couplings

You kept note of it all,
Petticoats trimmed with lace from the black heart of Europe,

Cotton from India, crystal from Lithuania,
A woman’s cheek wet with dew as paradise swims up,

Gold fish, icon of the journeying soul,
In a garden pond struck by muscular roots and fleshly scents

Ferocious toil with pitchfork and spade.
How much time is enough in the life of a poet?

You cannot answer now.
The chestnut trees are thick with rain.

You turn away from the window pane,
The dirt is a honeycomb of consonants.

Hour by hour as you come close to your death
Someone whose face is covered with a veil,

Man or woman I cannot tell,
Reads from the Letter of Paul to the Corinthians.

Reads in a slow, clear but quavering voice,
In speech that erodes the clarity of your own,

Crystalline disturbance of the liquid atmosphere
Where sun and storm collide,

Reads in the tongues of men and of angels,
From the poems you composed and poems to come,

Zone of limestone, chestnut and linden
Zone of sweet water, laced by fever,

Book of the migrant soul,
Now losing, now finding love.

(August 2004, New York City / Skopje)
Published in Harvard Review #28, Spring 2005

Closing the Kamasutra
From Quickly Changing River (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2008)

In another country at the river’s edge
We lay down in whispering dirt,
Then tried to fix a house with hot hope.
If we live together much longer
I’ll become a cloud in my own soul.
Sweet jasmine floats in a bowl,
A keyboard harbours insects
(Mites in secret laying white eggs).
I must light frankincense to smoke them out
Else the alphabets will fail.
It is written in the Kamasutra --
They embraced not caring about pain or injury,
All they wanted was to enter each other.
This is known as milk-and-water.


Published in Harvard Review #28, Spring 2005

Love in the Afternoon
From Quickly Changing River (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2008)

1.

Late in the afternoon, two days running
The sky’s a spindrift hole,

Backlit clouds hump into hills
Hovering over a sea of unwavering violet,

Waves mimic a house --
Host for memory

Wild flag flung over nothing,
Nothing at all I can hold onto.

***

In a back room two children
Dreamt of by Dante

She with hair drawn back
Skirt crimson, moist with dew

He, tender cheeked
Palms a mourning dove

Fit to brush her lips.
In his pocket a bit of paper

A calling card returned, sans address
Or watermark, utterly bare.

***

Two floating frames
I see them stamped with indigo

Petals of the dark lotus
Sporting a ring of nails

Sucked from a weaver’s hands,
Set into bracelets of torture.

2.

These are declensions of dream, merely
As coverlet damp with sweat

In our middle years we drop
Down, down, a deep down falling.

Will slit wrists hunger for skin?
Or cotton threads pulled

By finger and phantom thumb
Like nipples rubbed

Release a rare sweetness,
Surcease of sense?

***

In a house made of sand
A child with a pitcher at her hip

Goes down the veranda steps
Her pale skirt blowing,

Her lips moist with voiceless syllables.
Who will pluck them into words?

Bold vernacular
That sings our bawling birth

Our goings out and comings hither
Drawn into blessedness, a water crossing.

3.

Late in the afternoon, two days running
The botched and milky sky

Trailing behind
I go down the subway steps.

In underground light I see
The face of a girl known to me,

Beatrice, child who swallows
Her own shadow

Her short skirt cut of cotton
Seamed with silk

Stuck between her thighs
In the heat of an Indian summer.

***

Seeing her, the poet fainted.
A grown man fainting

On seeing a nine year old girl
Who has taken up residence in his memory.

What does this tell
Us about human nature?

***

When they picked him up
His head shone with a cap of blood

As if the sky had torn a hole
To birth him

And I heard him cry:
I am forced to write

Facing my love
For which no words exist.

New York City, June 2005

Published in, American Poet, Volume 29, Fall 2005