Articles

There they are. As though they are in bed.
A gesture here and there. Scattered. Enumerate them, establish their place and  moment.
You will see them time and again.

I hadn’t known she was there. The young woman, small and slightly hunched, was on the couch in the sitting room (baithak khana) when I came downstairs. One hand balanced a cup of ice cream; the other held a tiny spoon. Thick spectacles overshadowed her pretty face.

In the woods on the other side
of your chain link fence where does
and fawns paw at the frozen dusk
and a lone fox slinks across a clearing
on the prowl for something vulnerable

The first time I almost drowned was before I can remember. Mine was not an aquatic birth, but I did enter this world during the mercifully brief vogue for hurling newborns into water, supposedly triggering some innate ability to swim left over from when we were seafood. “You sank like a brick every time,” mom said.

Music dawns in the tea brimming with ants
My mother cuts the truth with scissors    great care
She sharpens her tongue while reporting on what is taboo

My too-soon-dead ex and I honeymooned
in a rented cottage on Sanibel Island.
We walked the beach that first afternoon,

noting the pink scalloped roof
that would guide us back to our boardwalk.

Exposed and foreign among the palm fronds
In a diatribe against the simplest things
Misunderstood and alone    a thousand times alone    in the middle of that ocean of people
   drowning with desires

It is necessary to speak of the difficult murmur of your eyes,
     like salt that is violent
or oblivions newly born, in the fear of being a new dove or
     a decoded temple

There is a hidden solitude at the moment of falling in love
that cannot be erased from our arms,
nor from the useless skin, nor from the heartbeat that awakens
     so many things

 To hear a voice that understands you is to freeze
     our absences.
To change the earth of our steps
into sudden echoes
and to unsettle the stillness of a horizon that already appeared to us
   alone and unreachable;