I.
She waited where the river ran
that summer as the floods began
stones sinking, fireflies murmuring
in paddy fields, herons on stumps of trees
the axe planted where little else would work
and everywhere the mess of water.

'So you have entered a new world'
her voice was low, growling even.
There was nothing humble in her voice.
Sometimes the dead behave in that know-all-way
ploughing the ruts of disaster,
their unease part of our very pith—
what the axe discovers marrow and meat to us.

'So what's it like there?' she asked.

I replied: 'As the Hudson pours
the river wall clings tight with glinting stones.
Yet what's so bright makes for odd imaginings.
Sometimes I feel as if a metal bowl had split
dented by blows from a woman's fist
and bits of spelling lessons, shards of script
struck from a past locked into privacy,
—this is the immigrant's fury, no?
Who understands my speech, further what is my speech?—
dropped, pounding as rice grains might.'

'You think that bowl's your head
your words a crypt! Look at your feet!
How can you stand addressing me?'
I heard her laughing bitterly.

'What's with you ?' I shot back
'What's with the dead, sheer jealousy?'

Her fingers waved a whitened scrap 
paper or cloth I could not tell.
She held it out to me: 'Take! Eat!'

I saw the sari that bound her
dropping free, feet cut at the ankles,
severed from her thighs, slicked with red earth.
Water poured in short streams
over her mutilated parts.
She stood, shored by a single elbow
against a mango branch.

II.
Place names splinter
on my tongue and flee:
Allahabad, Tiruvella, Kozhencheri, Khartoum,
Nottingham, New Delhi, Hyderabad, New York
—the piece work of sanity,
stitching them into a coruscating geography,
why a single long drawn breath
in an infant's dream might do,
—ruined by black water in a paddy field.

We wrestle on wet ground,
she and I, living and dead,
stripped to our skins,
naked, shining free in
the gold of a torn horizon.

Our thrashing is not nice.
Her ankle stumps shove against my eyes.

Words bolt, syllables rasp
an altered script
theatre of memory I could never have wished.
Breathless I search for a scene
mile long city blocks,
iron bridges scraping back short hills,
asphalt pierced with neon plots,
the rage of sense:
bodegas in the Barrio, Billy's topless bar,
Vineeta's Video Store crammed with cartoons
of Nutan and Madhuri
—'Kya, kya hum kon hai? Idher hum kon hai'
'Namal ivide ara? Ivide namal ara?'—

 The mixed up speech of newness,
flashing as a kite might,
pale paper on a mango branch.

III.
She waited where the river ran,
that summer as the floods began.

Is this mere repetition,
or the warm sprawl of time,
inscribed in limestone?
Who can cry back into a first world
a barefoot child on a mud forking path,
fields gold with monsoon water,
haunt of the snail and dragonfly?
What makes the narrative whole?

Beneath my cheek I feel her belly's bowl
thick with blood, the woman who waits for me.
Are these her lips or mine?
Whose tongue is this
melting to the quick of migrancy?
I touch raw bones, the skull's precise asymmetry.

As rivers north and rivers south soar
into tongues of mist parting our ribs
I hear voices of children whisper from red hills:
'An angel, you have caught an angel!'

She started to write fragments
as much to herself as to another
(Did he live in her mind?)
(Could the mind hold its hope?)
She wanted to write:
The trees are bursting into bloom.
She felt it, though it did not come to her
in that particular way, the sentence endstopped.
Would he come in a feverish script,
form finicky with sense, sharp as a wave?
Or was that the wrong way around?
The hold of things was perpetually askew—
it surprised her as she tried to think it through:
that branch when she walked in the grass
level with her ankle, surprisingly stout
thrust out of a main trunk, a gash on it,
sore vermilion, cupped
in a bracelet of dew, black with desire.

Kasuya Eiichi, poet of Japan, knows a place
where daffodils bloom, a dark damp place,
where hair slit from heads of young girls
sharpens the wind, where a moon soars
over a cliff and syllables of speech
melt into petals—ochre petals. I will ask him
to take me there, into that swamp of dreams.
When underground water seeps into my wrists
I'll cry out through the mists:
Come, look, I'll not flash daffodil flesh at you,
I am older, I have two children now
my breasts are jugs of blood,
my hair black with silver running through
makes a pillow for my man, his thighs
cut from river mud, belly gold with longing.

Kashi in a room!
She whispers
it's a dream:

Honey in a mustard
seed—the bead
of truth hidden
in a stream

But the banyan
tree is bare, brown roots,
cling to air.

Shall I search for
a grace—a room
with white walls
where honeybees roam
wild and free?

Madre de Cristo
I am swimming
in the sea!
What will become
of us?
What will become
of me?

—for Jatin Das

When he drew those massive
hooded women, cheeks, eyes, nose—
a city shifted its stones,
windows came ajar, doors flew open.

She saw a child on a swing
braids blowing in the heat,
women chopping baingan in a kitchen
a jamun tree fruit polished, pealing.

When he drew those toes
then circled thighs, arms, eyes
rain came down on the city.
She heard heels snapping,

Umbrellas poking at the sky
cotton sipping water... Chup, chup, chup
the saris went, dainty feet
reaching for the carts, bells jangling

And horses white, dripping
hooves reared in a festival of longing.