combing another woman’s hair.

If I should see the girdle

loosen from her waist

while you string jasmine

round her supine face.

If you should drink the honeyed sweet

from the petals

of her crimsoned lips —

I won’t question this betrayal,

or ask who this other woman is.

I’ll simply walk

into the dark

where every trunk

and branch and leaf

looks like you, feels like you,

speaks like you: deep-chested

yellow-limbed

rain-cloud blue.

And later, while the husband sleeps,

I’ll make my way

to the town’s cremation grounds.

I’ll strip away my clothes

and dance among the mounds of ash

to command the churning of a storm.

For I have been with you

since you were born,

and will stay with you

till you return,

soaked with the lasting dawn.

II. Elsewhere

“Journeys to relive your past?” was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: “Journeys to recover your future?”

And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”

ITALO CALVINO, Invisible Cities

Buffaloes

Impossible to imagine.

Buffaloes — a dream of them:

coats thick with rain,

bodies like continents.

A whole world thundering

through Indian laburnum.

Think of beginnings:

amusement parks at dawn,

pianos, bedrooms, gods.

Think of all the invisible

insurrections it takes

to wake a city from slumber.

In these woods, a single man

will do, armed with a stick

and a paltry collection of stones.

When I see buffaloes run

I think of love — how it is held

in the meaty, muscled pink

of the tongue; how quickly

it is beaten from us —

all that brute resolve

disappearing

in the undergrowth.

Michael Mangal’s Dream

The nights grow long in Pillowpanja

with all the people gone,

thinks Michael Mangal,

lying insect-style on his back

where his house used to be.

The stars seem closer too —

bare-boned, full of promises,

in this month-old lacerated sky

abandoned by the gods.

He could lie like this —

waiting for the winds to change,

for a spirit’s gentle finger to turn him over.

Or he could dream of pigs in pandanus

from Christmas lunch;

of the woman from next door

whom he never told he loved,

to reappear from the Kingdom of the Sea

and save him.

At daybreak he will scour the beach,

sift through broken bamboo stilts

and ravaged roofs,

a million orphaned carcasses.

He will lean against the ocean floor,

and imagine

the woman from next door

is offering up her watery chest

so he can listen for the sounds

of all the friends he’s feasted with,

built precarious houses with.

And later, when they finally speak of love,

she can drag him with her spirit hands

to that underworld of longing

and deliverance

where the season of the rains begins —

where children

saved inside their fathers’ thighs,