Prayer in that storm

was just a mouth gone wrong.

We tried our hands instead.

We made all

the signs we knew.

The skirling wind shredded our sails and danced on them.

Cape Caution

When you’re swimming from Cape Caution to Impulse Bay,

don’t miss the line where jade touches turquoise and recoils:

this is the jolt where nerve end meets salt,

this is the neverskin,

this is where you grow knife-edged fins and plunge:

you’re one light tremor away from sabre teeth.

The Heart Fixes on Nothing

Zafar

The heart fixes on nothing in this wasted province.

Whoever made anything of a kingdom of shadows?

Go find another home, my smothered hopes.

This stained heart has no roof to offer you.

I prayed for long life and got four days:

two were spent in desire, two in waiting.

Gardener, don’t rip these thorns from the garden:

they were raised with the roses by a gentle spring.

The nightingale doesn’t blame the gardener or the hunter:

Fate had decided spring would be its cage.

Fate’s real dupe: that would be you, Zafar, your body denied

two yards of spaded earth in the Loved One’s country.

And Sometimes Rivers

And sometimes rivers

that run in your veins

change course.

Silt marks the spot

from where you set sail

to circumnavigate the globe

and where someone wearing your sunburned face

stopped thrashing about in mangroves that wouldn’t let go

and stood still, bleached hair ruffled by the wind,

as if, after a voyage charted across fevers and hurricanes,

riding at anchor.

Risk

The earth here is glass, the wind the sting of a thousand wasps.

Whoever is driven north wishes he could burn in the fires of hell.

On this sea without horizons we do not sail by the magnet.

Of wisdom, the deep says, ‘It is not in me.’

As It Emptieth It Selfe

I.

At the mouth of the dog river

foam words foam words

currents of sand arrowing after fog birds

slack shadows engraved on the veil of the tide

that shimmers in and sags out

for the twentieth the thirtieth the emptieth time

the river going with the sea the sea going homewards

As It Emptieth It Selfe

You shall build your citadels on silt said the preacher

and sink your pride in spice currents

take your parakeets and painted cormorants

with you but leave the coconut palms and the Inca silver

leave behind a bloodful of curses

with strands of indigo wet bales of cotton

on this parched delta these dragged fields of salt

sweet strained with brack

For the Emptieth Time

II.

Splayed in his planter’s chair, the saboteur of silences toys

with a breech-loading Bible, cocked in defiance of treaties.

Nib sharpened by monsoon hungers, the chronic ache

of working in a country without plums or Bordeaux,

he writes home:

In this damnable climate, steel rusts, razors lose their edge.