with gleaming backs

and startled eyes,

learn to walk the sands again.

After the Rains

After the rains

the temple flowers

lie like fallen soldiers —

dirtied and bloodied pink.

I want to get down

on bended knee,

gather each broken petal

to my chest.

Out there —

where the river meets

the ocean’s mouth —

it would be called

the kiss of life,

a resuscitation.

But here,

with the world washed clean,

it is nothing but a trampling.

Found Poem

DIANE ACKERMAN, A Natural History of the Senses

One night a year,

in the Bahamas,

the Selenicereus cactus flowers

ache

into bloom,

conduct their entire sex lives,

and vanish by morning.

Fisher-Price Men

I’d forgotten about them,

those thumb-sized men

who lived for years

on our bedroom floor.

They were my brother’s treasures:

the green Texan, the road builders,

the circus ringmaster —

all hatted and moustachioed,

tunnelling out of the past

bearing the scars

of our dead dog’s tooth-marks.

Today, my sister’s boy from America

brings the village alive again,

leading the men to camper vans

and dusty deckchairs,

giving them names

like Harvey and Stan.

My brother sits in the corner,

rocking, oblivious.

He doesn’t rise to greet his childhood

spread out on the bedroom floor,

or say, Mine, all mine,

as he used to.

He is in a place of no time,

with no thoughts of death or fear.

Only the sound

of his beating heart,

which must tell him

that he is human,

that he too is moving somewhere.

Lesson 4: Zero, or Infinity (Ramanujan)

The man who knew infinity was born

not far from me, in December,

a long time ago.

It is December now.

The sky cranes her neck

towards the Sunday streets.

The universe does nothing

to steer this loneliness away.

Night brings the moon,

barbs and wings,

a thousand scatterings.

There’s a place that poets seek

as real and fearsome as the body.

When I find this place

I will lie down in it,

the dark, pockmarked endlessness of it.

The man who knew infinity

will be there, too,

unravelling the mysteries of zero.

He knows what it means

to take away, yet keep things whole,

to give without diminishing.

It is December now.

The poets fill rooms with dust,

and we still know nothing of love.

When I say, Come,

only the sky leaks in,

and stays a while.

Evening on an Indian Railway Platform

This is the time when ragpickers appear

with sun-bleached hair and hollowed chests,

when vendors replenish their wooden carts,

when stray dogs steal across railway tracks

with blood on their paws and the wind

on their backs, when televisions splutter

through cyclones and genocides,

when families in waiting rooms empty

tiffin carriers onto newspaper squares

to fill their bellies with rice, and stare.

After days of silence, we have arrived.

We will stretch our bodies along beds

that fold into walls, and dream our way back

to a city where dust storms into the house