Riveted to their compasses, rucksacks, mugs of coffee

spiked with rum at every station,

they stop in deserts and jungles, setting the time

by watches so disciplined their hands remain glued

at twelve. Their dreams smell of ghost towns

and echo with the chink of coins

dripping from a convoy rifled in the hills.

Wherever they go,

it is always midnight or noon.

VIII.

When Khadki was a base, the stationmaster complains,

everyone stopped here. Now the long-distance trains

zoom by without so much as a glance

at the semaphore’s proffered teacup, the fence’s

marigold garland.

The stationmaster and I trade metaphors,

work by barter.

But when the pylons by sheer instinct let the hawk plunge,

his wits on hold,

his wings like blades,

his descent timed to coincide

with the elections, when the orators ride in

on the clouds, and he must duck

to preserve his sanity,

his plunge belongs to both of us.

The wind’s forgotten tongue, struck dumb

by speeches, wets a half-built house

from door-hole to gutted walls that have toppled

into haywire fields where a discoloured poster

still holds high the chalky name and ivory grin

of the Party’s assassinated god.

His arm breaks the cordon of the poster,

offers the working classes a hand up

till the hawk snaps it off, sweeping it eastward.

IX.

In one lotus stalk out of a hundred in the field,

the king of the gods, Indra himself,

hides from a curse.

He lurks there, waiting in the pith for the black clouds

thrown up by the passing traffic to lift,

an atom ready to explode.

He has thought himself into a word

that I know this very moment

is swimming in the mouth of a fish:

it will come home in a catch, lie delicately

on my catalyst plate. I’ll prong a forkful,

stand by for the shock wave in my throat.

The pen takes the page for its citadel, keeping out the dragons

at the edge of each sentence. The ink takes the shape

that the driving nib gives it,

as timber ashed by the passage of lightning

becomes the sky’s voice among objects.

But when the bolt misses its mark, burying its charred code

in the wet earth outside the door, the rafters drop

a veil: sleep settles on the cat’s fur,

a cinnamon sheen; a flute’s high notes

hollow the lungs of the house, prickle the trestles

of tables, lull the black buck and the brocade girl

in the oval miniature to sleep.

The spines of books standing in rows,

the inner wheel of a shield embossed

with chinar leaves, and the wastes of Siberia

spun off a globe on an upper shelf have caught

the slanting edge of the light.

These sparks work themselves into my dreams.

Three dogs lick at lamplight in the hall.

X.

The electricity dead, by two candles

I think in longhand, typing as I do.