the dark pulse of incessant rain in granma's forestveined fore-
head, luminous lines of face-script, with-
out-breath, death-earthworm wriggled facebook, the
the the the she hates all the men her brothers husbands in-law cousins
upper & middle communits & congress
men, those fractious, factional ghosts with their idolatorous
unbreathing stonystoned gods,
for her she preferred those skull-gardened tongue-faced ones
but it is the men who end up stories--a dead policemean
by accident betel-or bloodied-mouthed, & on this side
more dead sisters,(too many unknown malnourished writers in the family),
a malayali medium's susurrant kunjikuttan in the village square
a 70s postmaoist suicide in a lockup, here advancing on the black page wrecking
mother's tongues granma a strand of stomach between the palewhite
blouse & petticoat has the head of a toothless monkey but with gums of gold
who caterwauls of the dark pulse of incessant rain in

ghazal

This is the end of love the last star in the final sky’s crushed and scabbed rhythms
The nightingale’s claw tears the rose-lip to a night-stabbing rain’s chanted rhythms.

It will sing through its’ flesh’s surcease till only the spread-eagled voice remains
And song breaks apart free at last of the wilderness of the throats’ coiled rhythms.

No pieties for separation can hope to assuage this shame’s spent and infertile soil
What was fervent once is now only the serrate reverberation of unrequited rhythms.

The nightingale springs out of infinity’s manuscript to decree its calligraphic truth
The rose of beauty slouches petals plucked as if to a dervish’s maddened rhythms.

There they lie arranged at last the nightingale’s beak and claw the rose’s nether-lip
To another world’s eye this patterned ruin is but a dance of hologrammed rhythms.

founder of the lineage a great magic iron bird


you see the bird laid 5 eggs & from each

5 ancients. generations later our master


(& then many other masters a self-distinguishing lineage)


as abbot he studied again-again the oldly forgot native religion


he changed the practice he took a wife. one day


his master said you are equal to my actualization go deeper still

go to nepal, where 1101 yogis still practice in the opened valley

(a fabulism of monkish giggle midst the veil on veil of mist)



all these teachers & their foreheads. after labor

through the ranks he returned ripe


transmitten with the sated karma, mining bodies


within bodies, sibi's dove within the lacquered flesh


root and router bodies- yet-


all this true enlightenment so few students.


he said i am nobody i just do my best make

your mind soft soap nothing sticks a spider in a cake

consider afflictions slowly. him asleep was clear light within.



for nine generations whispered shames

of extinguishement. (failed & dazzled by his failing). but


at the end a refined text-egg & another iron bird


a chanted unrhymed repetition a new order in baked souls

the cargo boat, ceylon, mozambique, the ocean's prisons.time's conch outstares,

involves




once again the featureless filament of the wooden minute


clock hands unheave the lair


(these stranded sailors laugh for the strangest reasons)


at the third floor window he leans on the balcony


hermetic becomes his rage. he only whistles never speaks.






a librarian in a city that does not exist. catalogues doze.




the pruned heart's oppressiveness premonitions no reconstitution only there is the




'mangled bicycle, the lizard's cold & crisscrossed belly'

riviera in the mind

the villas close as it turns warm.

the air is dry but is cool in the evening

and the water, amethyst


a tiny beach covered in seaweed four-feet thick


this is where she wanted to be

but could never return to / even / in memory

soul- flickering, white smoke, fragrance

or tremulous transparent sphere etc


(no, too ethereal, - too blunt an image).


imagine instead a plant within, hardy yet


to grow it needs the sunlight of your laughter


and equally: the water of your tears.

the last man on earth raised his hand and held out a flower.


he gazed up at the skyscrapers uninhabited for so long. then at the sky.


it was the millennial anniversary of the dying of the sun.


the stars came closer.


they said they were tired of having to be still so long.


they told him it would be a relief when he too left.

she felt the blood run
in the boar's head

sitting on the mud floor.
the others in the classroom
on chairs: the taga teacher
droning

she imagined: a blood-red blow
a final vivid death-rattle-reality

the severed head rolled away


she covered the bloodied hair with hay & burnt it.

organs in a soup. her head and palms cold.

another berkeley sunset

a flower by any other name...-


but, under-lit


by a setting sun


suspended in transparence


(not a color, not a detail, barely a glaze)


bitumen in lavender


the shape and lucency of urchins in flight


(the sky an upturned pot


holding a film of deep underwater)



-facing up diving downward


balancing in a reverie of patterned form.


in a minute the set sun will snap the image


and fold memory within
the eye's upturned palm-

itsn't only the painter

who lives on his fingertips

his heart a madder root



and swims from one descended image-mountain to another

scripts in water

imperceptum. inapparence. presence-



does not

apply it's self or optimize


is not persuasive


is equal to contradiction


lies undefended



plays with all cards open all eyes shut


lies likely unestablished.






an ocean opens in memory,


the brain a single thorn
weaving blood

the rain like a release of arrows

the earth like a bloodstained mace

smeared with grass and marrow.

the deer sacrificial. the hunter allegorical.

of constellations chasing constellations.

a tortoise the still soul of a churning ocean.

lectio difficilior.

the warrior shines in his wound

the single bullet revealing an opened red

the rod in his mouth a sun destroying the universe.

the river is a sister of the time of death

carrying away timid warriors to the town

of the king of the dead surrounded by kings

of the dead. the ghosts make wailing sounds.


the hour is the fire taken from the recitation

"as fire is covered by smoke so knowledge is covered with desire" Mbh

the rising son is an especial splendor


cloud and ocean cloud and ocean in lock


a blind man reads the late afternoon light
watches conch shells under water and later
the 16 crescent shaped parts of the moon.


a pilgrimage underwater under moonlight with the night
shining on the rising
moon a crescent on a forehead


the universe roams in all directions with flaming unibrow.

lotus metaphors

lotus charms as that of palms placed together

the red of nail and finger, the shape.

the red flowered lotus is not the dark blue flower.


filaments are lumen which the lotus eye perceives

& the crease of the garment is the interior distress

as one plucked from water, drooping


fragrant, exhalation as of a child's palm-clap


or: a lopped head, or the tip of a tusk, or spear


traveling from one war to another


its sharpness quick growing as lotus in new distant waters.


though the leaf repels, as words made but that do not stick

untaken advice and old remorse.


the night blooming white lotus is a dark complexioned lord

a landlord's end

in the end even the landlord grew intimate


as an old friend he looked at the servant & her children


the lightness, the freshness, o the repressible humanity




seemed as crushed rajnigandha in the dust of this midnight



if he could turn the wheel back-




the ceiling fan's thin-long stem's wide spoke chugs the liquifying heat of summer



(it seems even to hit an odd dizzy buzzed mosquito spilling his blood)



a sad & profound pleasure & meanness & quietness spreads up in him.



he feels after a long time. the present sharp as a shaving nick




all around, a zen udder of consciousness, a deep, cushioned, stained diwan



the drone of the fan is the metronome of his dying




in that stabled emptiness, each labored breath pops



the last flowers of consciousness- they explode his head-artery



his mosquito-blood splotches the haveli walls



is all death parasitic murder?- the children stare into his cataracted eyes



& absorbedly aim their catapult

in reply

FIRST POEM
>
> (from an old manuscript perhaps)
>
> we dislike that you men & w0myn of meane rancke
>
> wear silver buttons at your knees.
>
>
> or that those of greater liberal estate & education
>
> must for no cald blewe reason
>
> tolerate your wearing tiffany horlles & scarfes
>
>
>
> SECOND POEM
>
>
> as fatal thoughts hover
>
> children kiss trees
>
> breath catches an iron lung.
>
>
> faces in imagination's marmalade mist
>
> tapeworm their ways
>
>
> (six months later who would believe?)
>
>
> kisses in relief thread the dawn
>
>
> searching out the needing;
>
>
> flee. do, not talk.
>
>
> THIRD POEM
>
>
>
> tender but not without shape
>
> a single vein in marble virile
> in its solitude even in its
> blockedness, a nerve turfs
> the castle
>
> the sea roils away under
>
> the bay's window
>
>
> fake softness for love.
>
> small but large of gestures & always
> home in a pure raw
>
> mirrored oasis
>
>
> bird-flight
>
>
> skip upons the sea
>
>
> FOURTH POEM
>
>
>
>
> if this tongue's hum were not so
>
> unrelenting
>
>
> who would have the means?
>
>
>
> let the smile remain so
>
>
> metonymizings
>
>
> nothing more
>
>
> not even its
>
> linelike bone between the lips.
>
>
> separately together
> tear by tear
>
>
> feed & flee feed & flee
>
>
> like sad thoughtfulness of quiet
>
> after the excitedmost circus
>
>
> after the folded tent.
>
>
> FIFTH POEM
>
>
>
> the deeper the quiet the
>
> more the tenacity. all sort of things
> happen
> all over
>
>
> dream-poachers:
>
>
> in an iced land of pleasure
> they are most separate
>
> and each, by
>
> tolerating,
>
>
> recriminate
>
>
>

haiti

1. when young she wished to travel far, see skyscrapers

now dead, she'd give her wings as prayer for the surviving


2.a heart stops
just in time

to slip out the rib-cage &

perch

in a stranger's
memory.

ears grow so fine

that they can hear

as debris breaks up all-around

an ant's hapless,

infinite unfinished

rage-full scream-

every man or ant remains virginal to death

public deaths are solitary still

though one can't distinguish

one's numbed hours of pain or loss or rasped breath from another.



as strewn shanties articulate the earth's quake.


3. at night times ever


in an enclosed room,,, mummified as it seems


trapped as all would feel, where prayers are for dustless starlight



make agitations & nuisance & rage. step on the feet of icons.

translation of section of muktibodh's brahmarakshas

[found thanks to meera, & painstakingly retyped by her, from around 2000, m phil class at delhi university]


That side of the city near the ruins
an abandoned, empty well
and within, in cold darkness
in waters deep within
amid deep-sunken stairs
in the old stale puddle…
I can not follow these seeming-foundations
these depths

surrounding that well, entangled
silently stood the fig trees
in those hang the nests of the night bird abandoned,
brown, round

The smells of a hundred past pieties
green, jungly, raw
swim in the air and become the weighted doubt
of some unknown eminence
that rattles the heart

on the railings of the well, beguiling, green
elbows resting
sits the white flower-star tree

and nearby,
a flashing redflowered cluster
my kanher
calling me to that edge of danger
where the black mouth of the well
glances upward toward the sky’s void

in the void of the well’s thick darkness
sits the brahmarakshas
where from within rises echo after echo
like the mutterings of the insane
speculations,
impurity.
to wash away, at every moment
the shadow of – impurity
day and night, to make clean—
brahmarakshas, scouring his body
with the claws of his hand, again
and again hands chest mouth
still it remains…
still it remains

and…from the lips
wondrous strotras, mantras
fevered, chaste sanskrit curses,
crevices on the forehead weave
glistening strands of thought
in a continuous bathing’s insane flow
-- life’s sympathy blots
but, in the well’s deep inner wall
diagonal sun-rays fall and
motes rise, when
light surfaces
he thinks the sun has bowed and saluted him.

when moonlight forgets its way
and its rays bounce off the walls
he thinks it adores him as the
Venerable knower.

body and mind pierced, yet
he rejoices, feeling the sky
too has humbly accepted.
and with a twofold, frightening virility
his understanding mind ranges
through the folk-tales of Sumer-Babylonia, mellifluent Vedic hymns
today’s chands, mantras, theorems, theories
of Marx Engels Russel Toynbee Heidegger Spengler Sartre even Gandhi
everyone’s proof afresh commented on –
all this as he bathes in the well’s dense greenness.

…this thundering, echoing, moving
darkness-- bringing up phonemes
obscure words revolving anew
each word cutting up its resonance
each form battling its reflection
maimed
becoming
the echo that wars with its echo

upon the well’s rails
beguiling green elbows rest, and the
white flower-stars listen
-- to these echoes
the delicate fruits of the gooseberry tree
listen, the ancient fig
listens, listen too to the tragedy that meanders
in this insane allegory
-- all barred within this old well

owls' strange glitter eyes low-wing'd on hilltop:


less than a city. a bay. late upturned ocean's


light, of an end november's thanksgiving.


to return bag full of food to an interior

emptied, alchemised of silence



presence only in this eremitic ghost's laugh:

circular breathing

the snake slithers lost

sees the old places

disappearing.


it does not remember

everywhere all around the old palaces canyons of music

hung unsupported from the sky, invisible.


the heart of the fig was still cold

a live inner red of hibiscus


graves stay fresh, diaries with dates
but no years, suspended

timeliness.


in a sort of morning languour and at the sleep's edge
a lion peeps in inquisitive. make instruments of snake-skin

drive them out from paradise, but their body still holds some. walk


and walk and walk to see these last lions.

& images bloat and wave away,
swollen eyed & with the slashed tafetta

torn silk of rumpled skin


walk and walk and walk to see
waterbuck

catch polymbronic wasps


move in the sand's city like a snake on water
writing a disappearing script a

horse in orbiting gallop


like children's voices burying deeper
in time as it passes


eyes untouchable & in a different layer
from the faces in the old
sepia's oyster'd womb.


the grandmother's arms that reach below the knees
her looking perched in some elsewhere


some older past of the past
to her granma whose figure

did not come up legible
in these mediums of dark

so lost its the oldest memory

of the oldest when the oldest was
young she was beautiful


but not alive in light no memory
but mine and i cannot breathe

her luminosity into the camera's eye

so yes lost and the loss of even what was
lost and many many further mores-


her gait that of the cross rhyming drums.


the outermost rind of the brain perspiring

in this heat's evocation of ghost.


such landscapes command belief and no
malarial malaise resolves


a second, a third, a hundredth funeral and still
the ghost dissolves recurs calls deciphers

our hand's writing

her smile her briefcase her glasses her slipping
hearing her beer


2. yellowish curve contours the late
afternoon's high plain. midst painted canvas tepees & boarded up
small businesses by wet after-rain potholes,

a miniature stadium where the cameras catch up
on the dancers between 7 bass drums & amplification equipment
& soft voiced mcs making a strike for each tribe

from somewhere ornamented voices in falsetto,
vocables in a united concentrate & then
single file flamboyance, singers in farmer's caps

men dance alone, women in 2s & 3s

hours & hours of this owl-ish monophonic dance midst brief,
interrupting ceremonies beating percussive plancks & gambling bones & curing
by medicinal bundles & viscera of small local animals

wind instruments represent the superb naturale buttons
right song for the right anything, anything can be made
more auspicious more potent memorable w strings of deer hoove




3. night's cold

wave-rushes / the zebra's eye

lash lone in the single / intruding,


invading silence of space and


gorge. glad of

the hour's temptation for it was the path


elephants loved for its moistness an' shade



night runs its frenzy like a mute/ rolling, mountain range :-


3. one day i decided/to open that door again

to profane the relic, to put back the wandering ghosts amid the mice & bats

them bespectacled ghosts sucking at beehives, wearing snakeskin
trailing rat droppings.

how they solved the past
slowed the frame drank the carbolic acid.

they had no hunger. their teeth were failing falling

they needed no food. some petulantly obese some thin as teenagers

five red flames ring their hair they look unappeasably sad under unblinking lashes


i did not disturb them. i closed the door again.


4. ensphered in rain


a mosquito net afloat in sapphire forest air.

to the ear's farthest horizon again

again

the rain's pitterpatterpitterpitterpatterpitter roar


again-against



ascends the cochlea's spiral

world at -9

the quarter in the sky white
moon on the blue hills on
the green traffic arrow-Go

this was outside. the colors clean.


inside, and before, a pianist played
ravel's gaspard de la nuit.



the woman at the piano turned
to a single slather of a
wild calligraphic

stroke

piano keys snake
down the spine

flickering tremollos but all
still plosive


the call of the moral
life of joy

ears grow into elephant wing
strained dough in bubble


piano rises. floats & trans-
ports becomes a fist


banging walls & ceilings


the skull a drum


contra schumann it is
joy that breaks
in the fingers's bones

and falls as love


what a frozen little land
inside the piano.


immensity, it makes one feel
as a single
strand of

hair


in an emptied opera-house.

europe's winter breaking
over the berkeley mediterranean

the moon a white cancerous growing

quarter the traffic still weavering home

up the hill's twistings &

blue tablecloth sunset