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

breathing between their thighs;

when they set out for battle

with all three eyes on fire,

their golden breasts held high

like weapons to the sky.

Ode to the Walking Woman

after Alberto Giacometti

Sit —

you must be tired

of losing yourself

this way:

a bronzed rib

of exhaustion

thinned out

against the night.

Sit —

there are still things

to believe in

like civilizations

and birthing

and love.

And ancestors

who move

like silent tributaries

from red-earthed villages

with history cradled

in their mythical arms.

But listen,

what if they swell

through the gates

of your glistening city?

Will you walk down

to the water’s edge,

immerse your feet

till you can feel them

dancing underneath?

Mohenjo Daro’s brassy girls

with bangled wrists

and cinnabar lips;

turbaned Harappan mothers

standing wide

on terra-cotta legs;

egg-breasted Artemis —

Inanna, Ishtar, Cybele,

clutching their bounteous hearts

in the unrepentant dark,

crying: Daughter,

why have the granaries

and great baths disappeared?

Won’t you resurrect yourself,

make love to the sky,

reclaim the world?

Another Man’s Woman

My lover has failed to come to the trysting place,

It is perhaps that his mind is dazed, or perhaps that he went to another woman,

Or lured perhaps by festive folk, that he delays,

Or perhaps along the dark fringe of the forest he wanders lost.

JAYADEVA

If we lived in another age,

I’d have been the kind of woman

who refused to cast down her eyes.

The kind of woman

the other maids in town despise

because she forgets to tie up the calves

and split the curds.

You know the kind —

with a tilt in her hips

and hair that slips

continually

from her braids.

But since we live in a world

that’s just reflection,

perhaps I can be her after all —

the one whose hips defeat the mountains

with their greatness,

whose breasts are heavy,

close, and high —

sandal-pasted;

who walks through moonless nights

with lotus skin and lotus feet

across forbidden boundaries.

I’ll be the kind who sallies out

to wait for love

with musk-kissed hair

and navel bared

in a thousand secret places —

past the cowsheds

and the balsam grove,

across the river,

in the garden of hibiscus.

And although the night be dark

and fierce enough to stir

the seven sleeping oceans, I’ll deceive the forest

like a shadow,

slip noiselessly past

evil eyes and serpent tongues

and the husband who lies inside

jealous of my devotion.

But if I should reach the riverbank

and see you there —