Articles

The day they installed my mother’s catheter was the day of her defeat. Mine too, as would be revealed in time. It still amazes me that such a small device could undo us both; could reveal the limits of care and point the way, for me at least, to a new sensibility. 

Against an achromatic morning sky
in the pewter kink of a scrub oak limb
a gray squirrel, tensed in a quivering coil.

I jump out of bed,
leave to one side the objects
I accumulate
like the Egyptians
thinking they’ll protect me

A small plane moves above the coastline
dragging a banner with drawings
and words hard to make out
under the wind.

you obey disobedience
that benign fever
                                 rooted in twilight
you don’t transcend the tin funnel
where grace gushes

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