Leaving Yuba City Read online

  her head touches the stars. Remembers

  the animal trainer in her leopard skins,

  holding a blazing hoop through which leap

  endless smiling lions.

  Notes

  Mera Naam Joker: a popular Hindi movie featuring circus performers

  bajra: a grain similar to sorghum

  roti: rolled-out Indian bread

  Tiger Mask Ritual

  When you put on the mask the thunder starts.

  Through the nostril’s orange you can smell

  the far hope of rain. Up in the Nilgiris,

  glisten of eucalyptus, drip of pine, spiders tumbling

  from their silver webs.

  The mask is raw and red as bark against your facebones.

  You finger the stripes ridged like weals

  out of your childhood. A wind is rising

  in the north, a scarlet light

  like a fire in the sky.

  When you look through the eyeholes it is like falling.

  Night gauzes you in black. You are blind

  as in the beginning of the world. Sniff. Seek the moon.

  After a while you will know

  that creased musky smell is rising

  from your skin.

  Once you locate the ears the drums begin.

  Your fur stiffens. A roar from the distant left,

  like monsoon water. The air is hotter now

  and moving. You swivel your sightless head.

  Under your sheathed paw

  the ground shifts wet.

  What is that small wild sound

  sheltering in your skull

  against the circle that always closes in

  just before dawn?

  Note

  The poem refers to a ritual performed by some Rajasthani hill tribes to ensure rain and a good harvest.

  Villagers Visiting Jodhpur Enjoy Iced Sweets

  In their own village they would never dare it,

  these five men, sitting on the grainy grey sand

  by the roadside tea stall, licking at ices.

  Against their brown mouths the ices are

  an impossible orange, like childhood fires.

  They do not look at each other, do not speak.

  One man has loosened his turban and lets it hang

  around his neck. Another, crosslegged,

  grasps his ice with earnest hands.

  A third takes a minute bite from the side, willing it

  not to melt. The Lu wind

  wrenches at the fronds of date-palms,

  rasps the men’s faces. But the ices are cool,

  consoling tongues and throats raw from cursing

  the moneylender for unpayable debts, the gods

  for the rainless, burning fields.

  Soon, dust-choked, the village bus will come.

  The men will board, wiping their tinted mouths,

  surreptitious, on dhoti-edges. Back home,

  heads of households, they will beat

  wives and children as necessary, get drunk

  at the toddy-feasts. Their fields seized,

  they will hold their heads high

  and visit the local whorehouse. But for now,

  held within these frozen orange crystals,

  silent, sucking,

  they have forgotten to be men

  and are, briefly, real.

  At the Sati Temple, Bikaner

  The sun is not yet up. In early light

  the twenty-six handprints on the wall

  glisten petal-pink. The priest has sprinkled them

  with holy water, pressed kumkum

  into the hollow of each cool palm,

  the red of married bliss. The handprints

  are in many sizes, large for grown women,

  small for child-brides, all satis

  who burned with their husbands’ bodies.

  They have no names, no stories

  except what the priest tells each day

  to women who have traveled the burning desert

  on bare, parched feet.

  … they threw themselves on the blazing pyres

  tearing free of restraining hands,

  flowers fell from heaven,

  sacred conch sounds drowned the weeping,

  the flames flew up into the sky,

  the handprints appeared on the temple wall…

  The women jostle each other, lift

  dusty green veils for a closer look. Untie

  hard-saved coins from a knotted dupatta so the priest

  will pray for them to the satis,

  The young girls want happy marriages, men

  who will cherish them. The older ones ask

  cures for female diseases, for a husband’s

  roving eye. The priest hands out to all

  vermillion paste in a shal leaf,

  the satis blessing. The women kneel,

  foreheads to flagstones, rise.

  Begin the long way home.

  Sand wells up hot, yellow as teeth

  around their ankles. Sun sears their shoulders.

  No one speaks.

  Each woman carries, tucked in her choli,

  the blessing which she will put, for luck,

  under her wedding mattress. Carries

  on the heart’s dark screen

  images that pulse, forbidden, like lightning.

  … girlbodies dragged to flames, held down

  with poles, flared eyes, mouths

  that will not stop, thrash, hiss

  of hair, the skin bubbling away

  from pale pink underflesh…

  Behind, the Lu wind starts. Dust

  stings through thin veils. The temple wavers,

  pink in the gritty air. In this place

  of no words, the women walk and walk.

  Somewhere in the blind sand, a peacock’s cry,

  harsh, cut-off,

  for its mate or for rain.

  Notes

  dupatta: scarf

  choli: blouse

  shal: Indian tree similar to teak

  Although the practice of sati, the burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, was outlawed in India in the nineteenth century, isolated instances of sati, as in the case of Roop Kanwar, 1987, still occur, and sati temples extolling the virtue of the burned wives continue to flourish.

  The Babies: I

  Again last night as we slept,

  the babies

  were falling from the sky.

  So many of them—

  eyes wide as darkness,

  glowing lineless palms.

  The dogs crooned their coming. The owls

  flew up to them

  on great dusty wings.

  And all over the world

  from beds hollow as boats

  children held up

  their silent scarred hands.

  The Babies: II

  As in the old tales, they are found at dawn. Before the buses start running. Before the smoky yellow gaslights in front of Safdarjung hospital are put out.

  It is usually the sweeper who finds them. On the hospital steps, among Charminar butts. By the door, beside crumpled paper bags and banana peels. He lifts them up, his callused palm cupping a head that has not yet learned how to hold itself on the brittle stalk of the neck.

  Sometimes the sky is tinged pink. Sometimes it is raining. Sometimes the gul-mohur by the gate is just beginning to bloom.

  I am about to leave, the night shift over, when he brings them in. Wrapped in a red shawl the color of birth-blood. Or a green sari like a torn banana leaf. Jute sacks. Sometimes their eyes are blue as pebbles in their brown face. Sometimes they have notes pinned to their clothes. Her mother died. Her name is Lalita. Please bring her up as a Hindu.

  The babies hardly ever cry. They open that grave unfocused newborn gaze on me, as if they knew. I do not cry either. Not anymore.

  I find them bottles, milk, hold them as their mouth clamps ar
ound the nipple, their whole body one urgent sucking till it slackens into sleep. Their head falls back against my breast and I smell their warm moist breath.

  I take them to the Children’s Ward and lay them in cribs, their small fists dark against the white sheets, their eyeballs darting under closed lids. Sometimes they smile without waking up.

  I do not kiss them. I do not look back when I leave. By the time I return at night they will have been sent to the orphanage.

  At first I wanted to take them home. At first I wanted to find out what happened to them.

  Now I know the stories. They stick in me like shards of glass. The nuns taught her she was a child of sin. She was taken to be a maidservant. She ran away and was brought back. She ran away and was never found. No one would marry her. When she grew up she left her child on the steps of the hospital.

  Back at home I take a long shower. I scrub myself all over with the harsh black carbolic soap that stings the skin. Arms, legs, belly, breasts. But when I lie down in my narrow bed with its taut sheets, I smell them on me again, their clean milky smell. Their weight in the oval of my arm, their hair like new grass against my cheek. They suck and suck all through my sleep so that when I wake I will carry inside my buttoned-up body the feel of their tugging mouth.

  Indian Miniatures

  After a Series of Paintings by Francesco Clemente

  The Maimed Dancing Men

  After Death: A Landscape

  The Bee-Keeper Discusses His Charges

  The River

  The World Tree

  Arjun

  Cutting the Sun

  The Maimed Dancing Men

  After Francesco Clemente’s Indian Miniature #3

  There is joy in the intimate curve

  of the remembered elbow, in the invisible

  pointed angle of the toe. That is why

  we have no eyelids, why we

  will always stare at the horizon till day

  burns into blue night-ash.

  Our porcelain bodies cannot

  know pain, our ink hair

  cannot thin into greyness. See

  how we prance across the floor,

  the eternal magenta tiles

  you dreamed into being. How we polish them

  with our calm breath. See how we smile.

  Who says we miss

  our absent limbs? We know

  they are with us, like stars

  in the blind day, like the palace minarets

  the traveler in a painting never sees

  because they are behind the mountain,

  like the flute-notes balancing

  light as dust

  on the dark air of this banquet hall

  after we have gone.

  After Death: A Landscape

  After Francesco Clemente’s Indian Miniature #6

  Fire on one side, wind on the other.

  I stride over the hill’s

  green body. I have no legs.

  At my touch the shy leaves open

  into the shapes of eyes. I have

  no mouth. At my breath

  fruits ripen to crimson silk.

  No hands. So the stars

  float down like fireflies and pass

  into me, the calm moon

  hangs in frail fulness where

  my face might once have been. I move

  across the prickly-pear skin

  of the earth. I bless

  the fish, the stiff, silver-slender

  cranes. What is this place

  they bring me to,

  this cupola, its dome mother-of-pearl, its crest

  gold as longing? Lotus blossoms

  scent the air. Inside,

  my newborn body. It is wrapped

  in the red of beginning. Or is it

  ending? They place in my right hand

  a pale kite with a dark, unblinking eye.

  I give it a name: possibility, or perhaps

  forgiveness. The string lifts me. I fly.

  The Bee-Keeper Discusses His Charges

  After Francesco Clemente’s Indian Miniature #10

  The bees, as you see, are large but not

  dangerous. Affectionate, actually.

  See how they lumber

  over the sloped lawn towards me, how they nuzzle

  my hands. Contented and plump

  as afternoon cows, they rest in my shadow and buzz only

  if startled by the too-close swish

  of a monkey’s tail, the unexpected green flash

  of a parrot’s screech. You’re right. They’re not

  overly intelligent. They don’t know

  to crawl out of the way of hoofs, to

  cut through webs. Not even

  to look in flowers for honey. Pollination

  is a thought that has not occurred to them

  in years. Notice how

  they’ve forgotten the meaning of stingers

  and wag them fondly

  at approaching strangers? It’s my fault.

  I admit it. I spoiled them. Fed them

  sugar-water each day, rocked them to sleep.

  Hummed to them for hours.

  You’re wondering why. I think it started

  as an experiment. Or perhaps

  I was lonely. But now it’s become

  impossible. I don’t have a moment

  to call my own. They’re all over me

  with those hairy legs, those

  always-sticky feelers. It’s getting to where

  I’m about ready to step

  over the border of this painting

  into my other life, the one where

  I’m keeper of the fish.

  Note

  Indian Miniature # 11 depicts a man playing with fish in a river.

  The River

  After Francesco Clemente’s Indian Miniature #12

  I lie on the grass and listen

  to the river inside me. It

  pulses and churns, surges up

  against the clenched rock

  of my heart

  until finally it spurts from my head

  in a dark jet. Behind,

  the clouds swoop and dive

  on paper wings, the palace walls

  grow taller, brick by brick, till they rise beyond

  the painting’s edge. The river

  is deep now and still, an opaque lake

  filled with blue fish. But look,

  the ground tilts, the green touch-me-not plants

  angle away from my body. I am falling.

  The lake cups its liquid fingers for me,

  the fish glint like light on ice. Evening. The river pebbles

  are newborn pearls. The water rises.

  I am disappearing, my body

  rippling into circles. Legs, waist,

  armpits. My hair floats upward, a skein

  of melting silk. I give

  my face to the river, the lines

  of my forehead, my palms. When the last cell

  has dissolved, the last cry

  of the lake-birds, I will, once more,

  hear the river inside.

  The World Tree

  After Francesco Clemente’s Indian Miniature #14

  The tree grows out of my navel. Black

  as snakeskin, it slithers upward, away

  from my voice. Spreads

  across the entire morning, its leaf-tongues

  drinking the light. It bores its roots

  into my belly till I can no longer tell them

  from my dry, gnarled veins. And when it is sure

  I will never forget the pain

  of its birthing, it parts its branches

  so I can see, far

  in that ocean of green,

  a figure, tiny and perfect, pale

  as ivory, leaning

  on his elbow. He looks down and I know

  that mouth, those eyes. Mine.

  I raise my arm. I am calling

  lou
d as I can. He gazes

  into the distance, the bright, rippling

  air. It is clear

  he sees, hears nothing. I continue

  to call. The tree grows and grows

  into the world between us.

  Arjun

  After Francesco Clemente’s Indian Miniature #13

  Wall. Rock. Field. Sky.

  From the balcony of a palace that does not belong to me

  I watch the land

  open and fall away beneath my drawn bow. Pattern

  of mosaic. Point of roof. Hieroglyph

  of cloud. My thighs are the blue peeled trunks

  of eucalyptus. My obsidian arms

  slender and invincible

  as the hope of love. Brick on crimson brick. Flower

  on purple flower winding around

  this house of jealous suspicion. I breathe in

  the taut elastic smell

  of the quivering bowstring. Aim

  at the unrisen sun. The grass is splashed

  with the memory of light, the palace

  dappled by the thought of dawn. Somewhere

  in a forest a voice asks,

  which man is happy?

  Spire. Hedge. Bird.

  Split into three I am at once

  creator and sustainer. Destroyer. At once huge

  beyond seeing, and minute

  as the circle-center of a target

  against a far haystack. The wind

  curls whitely around my head, singing