seeking its way

into the sublime

those tendril feet

licking against the spine

of the stage,

After the lights

and the thrum of applause

have lifted into the streets

and slipped

into strangers’ apartments

to live between wall hangings

and philosophy books

like remnants,

After all this

don’t be surprised

to find yourself

in the same position again

splayed out on the bedroom floor

legs prised open

like a jewel box

the hinges

singing odes to joy

and the feet

those tiny miracles

pushing up and around

until they are joined

like hands

meeting wildly

unforgettably.

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?

Lesson 6: How Not to Age

It happens one night that the hurdles champ

of Loyola, Class of ’58, finds himself on the lawns

of a gentlemen’s club — shoulders stooped,

bandy-kneed, unable to hear or digest sugar.

It happens his wife dies first, and his children

frequently think, hypothetically, if Dad had gone

first, Mum would still have had things to do.

It happens that the man who threw the best parties,

the first person in town with disco lights,

psychedelic shirts, the works — now finds it difficult

to smile. And as if to prove this unhappy man

once had the capacity to dance, the moon skids over

his spectacles, does a little jig on the wintry expanse

of his head, eclipsing for a moment this night,

these stars, all the borrowed future ahead.

Lament — I

When I see the houses in this city,

the electric gates and uniformed men

employed to guard the riches of the rich,

the gilded columns and gardens,

the boats on water, I wonder,

how to describe my home to you:

the short, mud walls,

the whispering roof, the veranda

on which my whole family

used to spread sheets and sleep.

The year I came to find work in the city,

my wife painted our house white

so it would be brighter than the neighbours’.