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.

Evensong

after John Burnside

It’s moments like this

when the animals down by the river

are singing their lament for rain —

when fractured pieces of Canterbury

begin to show themselves in Madras

in cloisters and coconut husks

miracle windows of glass

It’s moments like this

I hear you on Pilgrims’ Stairs

pinning the day’s despair

to the underbelly of dusk

By nightfall

when the mosquitoes have retreated

and you’ve parted the skies

for cathedral spires to rise

you’ll have chanted our promise

of togetherness

repeated it like hollows worn in stone

But it is nothing —

this song of our communion

Less than what the animals share

as they walk to the riverbank in slow repair

stopping to lick each other’s wounds

No bonds to tie them

to the smell of certain skin

certain hair

That Woman

That woman is here again.

She’s found her way out

from under the stairs.

For centuries she’s been weeping

a song about lost men,

the disappearance of beauty,

disgrace.

Now she’s back in the world,

down by the traffic lights,

in the shade of trees,

hurrying to the parlour

to fix the crack in her face.

Don’t become that woman,

my mother said.

By which she meant,

don’t become that woman

who doesn’t marry

or bear children.

That woman who spreads her legs,

who is beaten, who cannot hold

her grief or her drink.

Don’t become that woman.

But that woman and I

have been moving together

for years,

like a pair of birds

skimming the water’s surface,

always close to the soft

madness of coming undone;

the dark undersides of our bodies

indistinguishable

from our reflections.

Lesson 3: Stillness

All morning I try to hold it —

the desperation of a fly

beating against glass,

a dog’s distant bark,

the dull throb of a lorry

winding its way up the hills.

By afternoon I think I’ve mastered it.

Nothing the world offers me

can be as complete or as full as this.

When I step into the light,

I have no song for the stones,

no thought for the grass.

I only want to remember

this long road,

this steady pulse,

which feels like love.

So when evening

feeds itself to night,

clearing the way

for frost or flood,

I’ll still be left with this —

the bright suffocation of flowers,

the weight of the day’s hours.

The River of Girls

i.m. India’s missing girls

This is not really myth or secret.

This murmur in the mouth

of the mountain where the sound