My song has put off her adornments.
She has no pride of dress and decoration.
Ornaments would mar our union;
they would come between thee and me;
their jingling would drown thy whispers.
My poet’ s vanity dies in shame before thy sight.
O master poet, I have sat down at thy feet.
Only let me make my life simple and straight,
like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.
I was passionate,
filled with longing,
I searched
far and wide.
But the day
that the Truthful One
found me,
I was at home.
Why I’ m going to the Taklamakan Desert:
the emptiness there.
Why I’ m going to the Taklamakan Desert
at seventy-five, leaving all words behind: the cry
of the emptiness there.
Why I’ m going to the Taklamakan Desert:
I can no longer stand
the world’ s greed
or mine.
There, in the Taklamakan Desert,
the silence of a thousand-year-old skull.
Translated from the Korean
Someone’ s coming
from the other world.
Hiss of night rain.
Someone’ s going there now.
The two are sure to meet.
Translated from the Korean
Chewing slowly,
Only after I’ d eaten
My grandmother,
Mother,
Son-in-law,
Two brothers-in-law,
And father-in-law
(His big family included)
In that order,
And had for dessert
The town’ s inhabitants,
Did I find, says Kabir,
The beloved that I’ ve become
One with.
Spaces in the electric air divide themselves
in circular rhythms, as the slender
grace of your arms and bell-tied ankles
describe a geometric topography, real, cosmic,
one that once reverberated continually in
a prescribed courtyard of an ancient temple
in South India. As your eyelids flit and flirt, and
match the subtle abhinaya in a flutter
of eye-lashes, the pupils create an
unusual focus, a sight only ciliary muscles
blessed and cloaked in celestial kaajal
could possibly enact.
1.
some things, I knew,
were beyond choosing:
didu — grandmother — wilting
under cancer’ s terminal care.
mama — my uncle’ s — mysterious disappearance —
ventilator vibrating, severed
silently, in the hospital’ s unkempt dark.
an old friend’ s biting silence — unexplained —
promised loyalties melting for profit
abandoning long familial presences of trust.
1
A bright red boat
Yellow capsicums
Blue fishing nets
Ochre fort walls
2
Sahar’ s silk blouse
gold and sheer
Her dark black
kohl-lined lashes
3
A street child’ s
brown fists
holding the rainbow
in his small grasp
4
My lost memory
white and frozen
now melts colour
ready to refract
Couched on crimson cushions,
pink bleeds gold
and red spills into one’ s heart.
Broad leather keeps time,
calibrating different hours
in different zones
unaware of the grammar
that makes sense.
Only random woofs and snores
of two distant dogs
on a very cold night
clears fog that is unresolved.
New plants wait for new heat —
to grow, to mature.
An old cane recliner contains
poetry for peace — woven
text keeping comfort in place.
But it is the impatience of want
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
