her head touches the stars. Remembers
the animal trainer in her leopard skins,
holding a blazing hoop through which leap
endless smiling lions.
Notes
Mera Naam Joker: a popular Hindi movie featuring circus performers
bajra: a grain similar to sorghum
roti: rolled-out Indian bread
Tiger Mask Ritual
When you put on the mask the thunder starts.
Through the nostril’s orange you can smell
the far hope of rain. Up in the Nilgiris,
glisten of eucalyptus, drip of pine, spiders tumbling
from their silver webs.
The mask is raw and red as bark against your facebones.
You finger the stripes ridged like weals
out of your childhood. A wind is rising
in the north, a scarlet light
like a fire in the sky.
When you look through the eyeholes it is like falling.
Night gauzes you in black. You are blind
as in the beginning of the world. Sniff. Seek the moon.
After a while you will know
that creased musky smell is rising
from your skin.
Once you locate the ears the drums begin.
Your fur stiffens. A roar from the distant left,
like monsoon water. The air is hotter now
and moving. You swivel your sightless head.
Under your sheathed paw
the ground shifts wet.
What is that small wild sound
sheltering in your skull
against the circle that always closes in
just before dawn?
Note
The poem refers to a ritual performed by some Rajasthani hill tribes to ensure rain and a good harvest.
Villagers Visiting Jodhpur Enjoy Iced Sweets
In their own village they would never dare it,
these five men, sitting on the grainy grey sand
by the roadside tea stall, licking at ices.
Against their brown mouths the ices are
an impossible orange, like childhood fires.
They do not look at each other, do not speak.
One man has loosened his turban and lets it hang
around his neck. Another, crosslegged,
grasps his ice with earnest hands.
A third takes a minute bite from the side, willing it
not to melt. The Lu wind
wrenches at the fronds of date-palms,
rasps the men’s faces. But the ices are cool,
consoling tongues and throats raw from cursing
the moneylender for unpayable debts, the gods
for the rainless, burning fields.
Soon, dust-choked, the village bus will come.
The men will board, wiping their tinted mouths,
surreptitious, on dhoti-edges. Back home,
heads of households, they will beat
wives and children as necessary, get drunk
at the toddy-feasts. Their fields seized,
they will hold their heads high
and visit the local whorehouse. But for now,
held within these frozen orange crystals,
silent, sucking,
they have forgotten to be men
and are, briefly, real.
At the Sati Temple, Bikaner
The sun is not yet up. In early light
the twenty-six handprints on the wall
glisten petal-pink. The priest has sprinkled them
with holy water, pressed kumkum
into the hollow of each cool palm,
the red of married bliss. The handprints
are in many sizes, large for grown women,
small for child-brides, all satis
who burned with their husbands’ bodies.
They have no names, no stories
except what the priest tells each day
to women who have traveled the burning desert
on bare, parched feet.
… they threw themselves on the blazing pyres
tearing free of restraining hands,
flowers fell from heaven,
sacred conch sounds drowned the weeping,
the flames flew up into the sky,
the handprints appeared on the temple wall…
The women jostle each other, lift
dusty green veils for a closer look. Untie
hard-saved coins from a knotted dupatta so the priest
will pray for them to the satis,
The young girls want happy marriages, men
who will cherish them. The older ones ask
cures for female diseases, for a husband’s
roving eye. The priest hands out to all
vermillion paste in a shal leaf,
the satis blessing. The women kneel,
foreheads to flagstones, rise.
Begin the long way home.
Sand wells up hot, yellow as teeth
around their ankles. Sun sears their shoulders.
No one speaks.
Each woman carries, tucked in her choli,
the blessing which she will put, for luck,
under her wedding mattress. Carries
on the heart’s dark screen
images that pulse, forbidden, like lightning.
… girlbodies dragged to flames, held down
with poles, flared eyes, mouths
that will not stop, thrash, hiss
of hair, the skin bubbling away
from pale pink underflesh…
Behind, the Lu wind starts. Dust
stings through thin veils. The temple wavers,
pink in the gritty air. In this place
of no words, the women walk and walk.
Somewhere in the blind sand, a peacock’s cry,
harsh, cut-off,
for its mate or for rain.
Notes
dupatta: scarf
choli: blouse
shal: Indian tree similar to teak
Although the practice of sati, the burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, was outlawed in India in the nineteenth century, isolated instances of sati, as in the case of Roop Kanwar, 1987, still occur, and sati temples extolling the virtue of the burned wives continue to flourish.
The Babies: I
Again last night as we slept,
the babies
were falling from the sky.
So many of them—
eyes wide as darkness,
glowing lineless palms.
The dogs crooned their coming. The owls
flew up to them
on great dusty wings.
And all over the world
from beds hollow as boats
children held up
their silent scarred hands.
The Babies: II
As in the old tales, they are found at dawn. Before the buses start running. Before the smoky yellow gaslights in front of Safdarjung hospital are put out.
It is usually the sweeper who finds them. On the hospital steps, among Charminar butts. By the door, beside crumpled paper bags and banana peels. He lifts them up, his callused palm cupping a head that has not yet learned how to hold itself on the brittle stalk of the neck.
Sometimes the sky is tinged pink. Sometimes it is raining. Sometimes the gul-mohur by the gate is just beginning to bloom.
I am about to leave, the night shift over, when he brings them in. Wrapped in a red shawl the color of birth-blood. Or a green sari like a torn banana leaf. Jute sacks. Sometimes their eyes are blue as pebbles in their brown face. Sometimes they have notes pinned to their clothes. Her mother died. Her name is Lalita. Please bring her up as a Hindu.
The babies hardly ever cry. They open that grave unfocused newborn gaze on me, as if they knew. I do not cry either. Not anymore.
I find them bottles, milk, hold them as their mouth clamps ar
ound the nipple, their whole body one urgent sucking till it slackens into sleep. Their head falls back against my breast and I smell their warm moist breath.
I take them to the Children’s Ward and lay them in cribs, their small fists dark against the white sheets, their eyeballs darting under closed lids. Sometimes they smile without waking up.
I do not kiss them. I do not look back when I leave. By the time I return at night they will have been sent to the orphanage.
At first I wanted to take them home. At first I wanted to find out what happened to them.
Now I know the stories. They stick in me like shards of glass. The nuns taught her she was a child of sin. She was taken to be a maidservant. She ran away and was brought back. She ran away and was never found. No one would marry her. When she grew up she left her child on the steps of the hospital.
Back at home I take a long shower. I scrub myself all over with the harsh black carbolic soap that stings the skin. Arms, legs, belly, breasts. But when I lie down in my narrow bed with its taut sheets, I smell them on me again, their clean milky smell. Their weight in the oval of my arm, their hair like new grass against my cheek. They suck and suck all through my sleep so that when I wake I will carry inside my buttoned-up body the feel of their tugging mouth.
Indian Miniatures
After a Series of Paintings by Francesco Clemente
The Maimed Dancing Men
After Death: A Landscape
The Bee-Keeper Discusses His Charges
The River
The World Tree
Arjun
Cutting the Sun
The Maimed Dancing Men
After Francesco Clemente’s Indian Miniature #3
There is joy in the intimate curve
of the remembered elbow, in the invisible
pointed angle of the toe. That is why
we have no eyelids, why we
will always stare at the horizon till day
burns into blue night-ash.
Our porcelain bodies cannot
know pain, our ink hair
cannot thin into greyness. See
how we prance across the floor,
the eternal magenta tiles
you dreamed into being. How we polish them
with our calm breath. See how we smile.
Who says we miss
our absent limbs? We know
they are with us, like stars
in the blind day, like the palace minarets
the traveler in a painting never sees
because they are behind the mountain,
like the flute-notes balancing
light as dust
on the dark air of this banquet hall
after we have gone.
After Death: A Landscape
After Francesco Clemente’s Indian Miniature #6
Fire on one side, wind on the other.
I stride over the hill’s
green body. I have no legs.
At my touch the shy leaves open
into the shapes of eyes. I have
no mouth. At my breath
fruits ripen to crimson silk.
No hands. So the stars
float down like fireflies and pass
into me, the calm moon
hangs in frail fulness where
my face might once have been. I move
across the prickly-pear skin
of the earth. I bless
the fish, the stiff, silver-slender
cranes. What is this place
they bring me to,
this cupola, its dome mother-of-pearl, its crest
gold as longing? Lotus blossoms
scent the air. Inside,
my newborn body. It is wrapped
in the red of beginning. Or is it
ending? They place in my right hand
a pale kite with a dark, unblinking eye.
I give it a name: possibility, or perhaps
forgiveness. The string lifts me. I fly.
The Bee-Keeper Discusses His Charges
After Francesco Clemente’s Indian Miniature #10
The bees, as you see, are large but not
dangerous. Affectionate, actually.
See how they lumber
over the sloped lawn towards me, how they nuzzle
my hands. Contented and plump
as afternoon cows, they rest in my shadow and buzz only
if startled by the too-close swish
of a monkey’s tail, the unexpected green flash
of a parrot’s screech. You’re right. They’re not
overly intelligent. They don’t know
to crawl out of the way of hoofs, to
cut through webs. Not even
to look in flowers for honey. Pollination
is a thought that has not occurred to them
in years. Notice how
they’ve forgotten the meaning of stingers
and wag them fondly
at approaching strangers? It’s my fault.
I admit it. I spoiled them. Fed them
sugar-water each day, rocked them to sleep.
Hummed to them for hours.
You’re wondering why. I think it started
as an experiment. Or perhaps
I was lonely. But now it’s become
impossible. I don’t have a moment
to call my own. They’re all over me
with those hairy legs, those
always-sticky feelers. It’s getting to where
I’m about ready to step
over the border of this painting
into my other life, the one where
I’m keeper of the fish.
Note
Indian Miniature # 11 depicts a man playing with fish in a river.
After Francesco Clemente’s Indian Miniature #12
I lie on the grass and listen
to the river inside me. It
pulses and churns, surges up
against the clenched rock
of my heart
until finally it spurts from my head
in a dark jet. Behind,
the clouds swoop and dive
on paper wings, the palace walls
grow taller, brick by brick, till they rise beyond
the painting’s edge. The river
is deep now and still, an opaque lake
filled with blue fish. But look,
the ground tilts, the green touch-me-not plants
angle away from my body. I am falling.
The lake cups its liquid fingers for me,
the fish glint like light on ice. Evening. The river pebbles
are newborn pearls. The water rises.
I am disappearing, my body
rippling into circles. Legs, waist,
armpits. My hair floats upward, a skein
of melting silk. I give
my face to the river, the lines
of my forehead, my palms. When the last cell
has dissolved, the last cry
of the lake-birds, I will, once more,
hear the river inside.
The World Tree
After Francesco Clemente’s Indian Miniature #14
The tree grows out of my navel. Black
as snakeskin, it slithers upward, away
from my voice. Spreads
across the entire morning, its leaf-tongues
drinking the light. It bores its roots
into my belly till I can no longer tell them
from my dry, gnarled veins. And when it is sure
I will never forget the pain
of its birthing, it parts its branches
so I can see, far
in that ocean of green,
a figure, tiny and perfect, pale
as ivory, leaning
on his elbow. He looks down and I know
that mouth, those eyes. Mine.
I raise my arm. I am calling
lou
d as I can. He gazes
into the distance, the bright, rippling
air. It is clear
he sees, hears nothing. I continue
to call. The tree grows and grows
into the world between us.
Arjun
After Francesco Clemente’s Indian Miniature #13
Wall. Rock. Field. Sky.
From the balcony of a palace that does not belong to me
I watch the land
open and fall away beneath my drawn bow. Pattern
of mosaic. Point of roof. Hieroglyph
of cloud. My thighs are the blue peeled trunks
of eucalyptus. My obsidian arms
slender and invincible
as the hope of love. Brick on crimson brick. Flower
on purple flower winding around
this house of jealous suspicion. I breathe in
the taut elastic smell
of the quivering bowstring. Aim
at the unrisen sun. The grass is splashed
with the memory of light, the palace
dappled by the thought of dawn. Somewhere
in a forest a voice asks,
which man is happy?
Spire. Hedge. Bird.
Split into three I am at once
creator and sustainer. Destroyer. At once huge
beyond seeing, and minute
as the circle-center of a target
against a far haystack. The wind
curls whitely around my head, singing