surrendering to verse

is a fair description. having caught the poetry bug (from the likes of my mother, I suspect--a hereditary susceptibility) I find myself uninterested, for the time being, in prose.


Rainy morning in Sipadol

In this monsoon deferred, hard to avoid the feeling
It should have rained harder, or not at all.
Not wrong to look for drama in the weather
And scorn the steady drizzle that breeds
Fibonacci series of cups of milkless tea
and games of scrabble.

Pole of this place, the towering Pipal
Danced to the tune of the breaking storm
Creaking bows flash-illumined in violet
Greeting my sleep-muzzled head at 6:00.
Like an egg from the heavens it should have exploded,
this 'weather event', in a goo of white and yolk, shard of shell.
Messy little encapsulation of life & death
And the embryo-smudge shades between.
Instead I sip my tea, hot and gingery
As the albumin drips down, static, numb
Onto the village spared and cheated of
The fecund violence, its due.


What gods

soft, dusty feet find their way
to a shrine in the woods
what gods of this place
I know not
simple stones massively tika’d
stick of incense wedged between old bricks
a naked lightbulb miraculously lit
its wire snaking away through the trees
bells and vermillion


Kathmandu scenes

An unearthly blossoming
Purple of play-doh or steaming entrails
On tree after urban tree
Makes me question my vision:
Maybe a sensory fuse is blown
And the grass isn’t really
That flat green, either—an improbable color.
And sky? Shell grey?
I doubt.

But less likely things have happened
Here in Kathmandu. Just last week
I merged with an orange crowd
Everyone dusted with the fine powder
by mid-morning
ringing in the new year
and taking the gods out for a stroll on careening palanquins
under twirling parasols ornate as tiny lawn mushrooms
and stealing my wallet.

Not long ago I glimpsed, from the corner of my eye,
An old woman, wrinkled and browned
Sitting implacably on the sidewalk
Trimming her toenails with a buck-knife.
Really? This is double-take material, after all
And I look again, or never stop looking,
Until my foot finds a foot-sized hole in the street
My right leg vanishes to the thigh
Into the Baluwa Tar gutter.
Unsheathing myself from the gunky trap
I’m missing some shin-skin
(Traded in for grit-shit).
But I get to keep the fish-shaped scar,
Memento of the time this inscrutable city
Tried to swallow me.


The Pines

The pines were calling. Too many words.

I strode, rubber-shod, up the dirt track
Past sprouting maize and cucumber trellises
Awaiting tendrils’ curl

Past the quiet rhythmic work
Of threshing grain

Past cud-chewing cattle

To the dusty road etched into the hillside
Remnants of field terraces still discernible
A vertical labyrinth blanketed in long, rusty pine needles
Slippery underfoot
And smelling sweetly of decay

Perched on that dry-slippery slope
I squatted, dug in my heels

There’s nothing to tell:
Wind and sun
And thoughts like doves
Quiet but insistent
Taking flight

I came down from that high place
Past cabbages and incipient beans
Rubber sandals in hand
Dust between my toes
Still trailing words.


Three Ayurvedic Riddles

Ojas

The essence
Lube of life
White-gold as ghee
Sweet as honey
Fragrant as paddy
Eight drops only


Tejas

Finest fire’s
Subtle refiner
Keeper’s finder
Luster-miner


Prana

Flash
without sound
Signal
no ground
Breath
all around