To Shakti

I have seen you sometimes,
a yellow sky wrapped around you
your face beautiful as a cyclone,
glowering at the salty rim of the horizon

or wreaking havoc at the beach
tearing up arms and legs, tossing them to sea
faster than any wave can catch.

At the temple, I catch a glimpse
of your face, obscure and absurdly smiling.
It is not how I pictured it.
The priest waves me on. Outside
a gaggle of beggars, upturned hands
like neatly unfurling buds

and a million stone steps
which I walk with crystal feet
praying my ceaseless prayer:

You of the unfailing memory,
give me the strength to forget.

*First published in Yellow Medicine Review.

The Patio

This is the space of distilled things.

Sunlight filters through the jagged
red edges of leaves and a Carnatic raga
in the house across the street
is pleasanter for being remote
and beyond my control. Still further,
the faint sounds of delighted shouts
over something surprisingly found.

Pale-headed Anthurium speckle
the green. Pure. Spatulate. Each
tentatively nodding flower holed
with little flecks of emptiness
where body should have shone.
The snails have been at it again.

Oil lamps in bright pink, gold and
green, now extinguished, are calm
as a row of Kathakali dancers at rest,
their masks off, hands still.
The night’s festivities are over,
they seem to say, and it is time
to seek the darknesses.

I gulp the cool, clear rustle of air.
Its sharpness on my tongue is the
memory of unripe berries, peppermint,
orgasm. I curl my toes into moist soil
hear the earth cake between them.
I will walk to the store this way
barefoot, earth-smudged, sated.

*First published at Cha: An Asian Journal

Older

A green-burn howl slithers along the pavement
slick with rain and fallen Cassia buds.

My father’s corpse was dragged reluctant
through these streets, dry as a winter sheath,

coarse and brown like a crumble of leaves,
stale-smelled, arranged into neatness.

The walls of his house, once white, turned pink,
rosed with the seep of his blood in crannies.

The beams loosened and started in sudden fits.
The pillars leaned together in sighs.

Sometimes when I wake at first light,
cold with thirst, the rattle of wind in my chest,

I look to left and right for a hand that moves,
prick ears for the swung window, the rustle

near the old grandfather’s clock with the round
face, and am never quite sure that it’s not there.

*First published at Quay Journal

Obando

dance to the knock
of bamboo sticks
on moonlit streets.
the mid-May
swelter curves
in between your breasts
and drops its tang
into your throat.
with your hips,
the world revolves.
dance
like a roar in the streets,
an ocean stampeding
past the houses,
a bustling, foamy pour,
mad and glinting
with excess.
and love
your dancing neighbour!
for she wants
the same things as you
and when you look
into that childish face,
into those need-mad eyes,
you can forget
what went before.
and love
your dancing neighbour!
for in her, you are mirrored.
your elbows,
your swan-like ankles,
your valleys and rivers
and the boats you sail in them,
the triangle
of your body and the
roundness of your pant
in her, you see them all.

*First published in Yellow Medicine Review.
**Obando Fertility Rites is a Filipino dance ritual.

Mourning

Mourning is messy business.
It’s not a flat plane from here
To there. It’s uneven
like the ridged underside
of your tongue, the slip
and fall of words, stalagmites.

Death is not clean. It’s all
black maw and smell of rot,
dreams of bats and dust,
gutters and ghosts.
The only precise thing
are the limbs, their

geometric stillness. Ignore
the radio static in your head.
Maintain decorum. Do not
run after the hearse in a dirty
nightgown. Do not howl wolflike
over the body. There is no live

thing trapped in there. It is not
a mistake. There will be no
scratching at the door
or under the earth at midnight.
Do not drink unnecessary
amounts of water; the rasp

is just the beginnings of a sore
throat, not the start of something
cancerous. Do eat.
The digestive system
is your one, unassailable proof
of being alive.

*First published in Mosaic, a Unisun anthology

I Remember Siachen

I remember Siachen.
Mostly because you came back from it
but not to me.
You wanted freedom, you said,
from both war and love.
And I, who had breathed less each night
thinking of you in ever-thinning air, thinking
of your face shrinking, of its broad planes
becoming sharper in the cold,
in your wait for something to happen,
for heroism to swoop like a bird,
thinking of the way you danced,
and waited by the phone,
licked envelopes with a dry tongue,
watched mosquitoes settle on my foot like beauty spots
and all that time, wanted to lick the snow off your lips,
I put the receiver back in its cradle.

I took a flight to Pune to make love to you
to show you how perfect it could be.
I cried on the way back
and vowed that I’d never love an army man again,
a man for whom death was the only tragedy
worth remembering.

*First published in Mosaic, a Unisun anthology

Codes of the Body

There is shame (I’ve heard) in things that concern the body
I try to forget its call and yet I yearn the body

Ash is air. Water expands with light. Flowers decay.
Hold these secrets in your hand when you burn the body.

Degrees gather mold in the old, neglected cupboards
Now, your mad dance is a bid to–what? Learn the body?

“The body is sacred”, poor fool Whitman forgot this fact:
Sanctity has a stiff price. One must earn the body.

In bedsores and in boredom, life passes by grimly
Play the radio. Remember to turn the body.

Like new leaves in rain, I turn green in your passion
I fear this love will blast the soul, even spurn the body.

When you are gone, I will wear black and roam the streets
Let them call me mad; I will not return the body.

*First published in Mosaic, a Unisun anthology

Arambol

The smell of hashish in the air is a dancing
thing. The girl’s small, curved hands are

like two shells in sleep. The bartender
raises his foot and brings it down on a

crab, spilling its meat onto the sand, leaving
a pattern in entrails. I eat my tuna salad.

The boys on the beach turn over in their sleep
and the one-eyed man in the café cups

his face thoughtfully. Such violence
on gentle shores is common.

In the distance, a blue boat is a blemish
I could rub away, a

transgression. The beach continues to
burn in its silent, unstoppable way.

*First published at Cha: An Asian Journal

Still Life

Peach
heavy on my palm.
Its hard-knot,
rattling heart muffled
by flesh I want to pierce.

Its skin
soft as felt, smooth as
unshaven down
on bare arms, dust on
butterfly wings.

Its in-between colour –
less than orange
not quite pink,
ambiguous
like brown.

Apples, pears and plums
are cool against the
cheek, but a peach

is warm.

***

Sunflowers

Their brown hearts shrivel
easily. They seethe in their skins
with the patience of

stalkers. In Van Gogh’s paintings,
they wilted in the heat of his
brilliant chrome

but they were indoors, you understand.
Try leaving them in a field. They
will grow like an army. Their

upturned faces will teach you
devotion and their fierce,
absurd longing

for a distant star
will demonstrate the joy
in things unrequited.

*Originally published in the anthology Mosaic.

A Violence Done

The sugary smell of aftershave
bursts over her skin like bubbles.
The taste of rotting leaves
in her mouth and behind clinched
eyelids, the black churns
like gnashing seas. Her legs
cycle the air so tightly.
Against the murky pane,
a fly drums its hope
with a single pair of wings.
The fan is white, flecked
with brown, noiseless. Outside,
the sounds of an ordinary day
never cease.

All the way back in the bus,
the smell clings to her
like a low-grade fever.
Her fierce stare is on the sea
and one small hand
clenched tight around the ticket.