After
the Rains
After the rains
the temple flowers
lie like fallen
soldiers –
dirtied and bloodied
pink.
I want to get down
on bended knee,
gather each broken
petal
to my chest.
Out there –
where the river meets
the ocean’s mouth,
it would be called
the kiss of life,
a resuscitation.
But here,
with the world washed
clean,
it is nothing but a
trampling.
Lost
These walls are from yesterday.
Today, rain falls like history,
and trees speak of distant woes.
My father stands on a cliff
contemplating
childhood.
By afternoon, the world has changed,
become smaller,
desolate.
All this is nothing –
these red leaves on Autumn walks,
these planets hurtling from long ago.
Later, we may dream of fires
and
singing.
The house will open her doors
for the dark, salty territory of night
to enter on wet footstep,
falcon
wing.
My father comes in to turn off the lights.
Together, he says,
we must call
in the lost,
breathe shape into all that is vanishing.
The
River of Girls
i.m. India’s 10
million missing girls
This is not really
myth or secret.
This murmur in the
mouth
of the mountain where
the sound
of rain is born. This
surging
past pilgrim town and
village well.
This coin-thin vagina
and acid stain of
bone.
This doctor with his
rusty tools,
this street cleaner,
this mother
laying down the bloody
offerings
of birth. This is not
the cry
of a beginning, or a
river
buried in the bowels
of the earth.
This is the sound of
ten million girls
singing of a time in
the universe
when they were born
with tigers
breathing between
their thighs,
when they set out for
battle
with all three eyes on
fire,
their golden breasts
held high
like weapons to the
sky.
Love Poem
Ultimately, we will lose each other
to something. I would hope for grand
circumstance – death or disaster.
But it might not be that way at all.
It might be that you walk out
one morning after making love
to buy cigarettes, and never return,
or I fall in love with another man.
It might be a slow drift into indifference.
Either way, we’ll have to learn
to bear the weight of the eventuality
that we will lose each other to something.
So why not begin now, while your head
rests like a perfect moon in my lap,
and the dogs on the beach are howling?
Why not reach for the seam in this South Indian
night and tear it, just a little, so the falling
can begin? Because later, when we cross
each other on the streets, and are forced
to look away, when we’ve thrown
the disregarded pieces of our togetherness
into bedroom drawers and the smell
of our bodies is disappearing like the sweet
decay of lilies – what will we call it,
when it’s no longer love?
Seasons
By October the reach of sky is complete.
Everything longs for escape –
the snow geese weaving their way south,
the pigs in
the yard,
the
leaves.
We are walking that line between the trees,
shameful in their half-foliage,
replete
with desire.
Somewhere across the valley
there must
be another life –
a woman drawing her children a bath,
a husband returned to this picture of wife.
If we believed in seasons
how easily
we could hold to this:
this falling away and returning.
But we, who live
with only
the heat and rain,
with perpetual dying –
we, who are impervious to birdsong,
we must imagine the sound of love
as something of a deafness –
a single vowel of longing scratched across the sky.
Michael Mangal’s Dream
The nights grow long in Pillowpanja
with all the
people gone,
thinks Michael Mangal,
lying
insect-style on his back
where his house once used to be.
The stars
seem closer too –
bare-boned, full of promises,
in this month-old lacerated sky
abandoned by
the Gods.
He could lie like this –
waiting for
the winds to change,
for a spirit’s gentle finger to turn him over.
Or he could dream of pigs in pandanus
from
Christmas lunch,
or the woman from next-door
whom he
never told he loved,
to reappear from the Kingdom of the Sea
and save
him.
* * *
At daybreak he will scour the beach,
sift through
broken bamboo stilts
and ravaged
roofs,
a million orphaned carcasses.
He will lean against the ocean floor,
and imagine
the
woman from next door
is offering up her watery chest
so he can
listen for the sounds
of all the friends he’s feasted with,
built precarious houses with.
And later, when they finally speak of love,
she can drag
him with her spirit hands
to that underworld of longing
and
deliverance
where the season of the rains begin –
where children
saved inside their fathers’ thighs,
with gleaming backs
and startled
eyes,
learn to walk the sands again.
Michael Mangal was the lone survivor of the island of Pillowpanja
of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands after the
Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004. He was rescued by the Indian Navy almost a month
after the waves hit.
