[1] Making Faces

When I pursed and elongated my oblong mouth To make my pig face at her teasing laughter, she Returned and kissed my snout, as if I was pitiable.

[2] Lineaments of Gratified Desire

A quite room humming with slight sounds: scrape of Turning pages, scratch of pen on paper, satisfied ex- Halations of two people deeply engaged in reading. Words that are bearing them across a river of time In their fragrant holds - two castaways, even as they think

Of themselves as important engaged in thinking significant Thoughts, always in need of love, a shoulder to lean back On, and an ear to listen to whatever annotation the other Might write on the margins of the book, the book of days.

[3] Raw Material for Dice

In an ancient epic the fate of a band Of brothers was sealed to twelve years Of forested exile by a pair of loaded dice Carved from the bones of a cursed king.

Here, separated from the shadow that My heart used to cast on a sun-glazed Beach, and a brother who promised to Follow me across few footfalls behind,

I wonder from what demon-bone Were the dice fashioned for that Game in which I was blessed With these many years of exile?

[4] Visions at a Window

This is what I ask strangers first, By the way of opening lines In letters I write to them, “Tell Me what do you see when you Look out of your window?

A tree? A bird nest in the tree? A tarred roof spiked with antennae? A panorama of a city twinkling? Sky crosshatched with jet contrails? Or if fortunate, blue expanse of sea?”

Oak, beech, and oak again have been My silent sentinels in these long years Of silence, in which the knife of exile Had slit open the bag of language And taught me their foreign names.

If I look backward, in that orphic Instant, I am covered with the shadows Of more trees: all bloody gulmohars.

[5] Confessor

She tells me, after warning me that I many not approve (because she Doesn’t approve herself?), that she Is in love with a man, as I had already Guessed, who happens to be married.

I say nothing, nothing at all till her Expectation for consolation, forces My doubts to surface on language:

“What horsemen ride in the human heart I have so far barely deciphered, as I haven’t Understood passion and its attendant grief. So into the gaping maw of want, of wanting To be loved and to love back, I feed morsels Of simpler and surer pleasures: talk, laughter And if possible, an approximate kindness.”

[6] An Encounter with Snake Kin

One sodden night this past winter as I was walking the black dog On one of his nightly visitations to my dump, I saw a baby snake Coiled in the middle of the semi-dark sidewalk, issuing a challenge In its forked language, eyes beady with rain, unwilling to back down

And slither away into the frost-burnt foliage. I don’t remember now What I, searching in my reptilian memory, said to it in return, my Tongue dripping with this sweet venom I force from inside myself On Sabbaths. Did I curse it for Eve’s (who has gone missing since) Temptation, my banishment from paradise & my descent into shame?

[13] You come back to the hole-in-the-wall in the afternoon for a nap. And you are woken up by an apparition who walks into the room, a living proof that human skin is as tough as it is fragile. It must be a “she” for the voice that says hello to you has a high pitch. You nod and wave, fascinated by all the tattoos covering almost all the exposed, which is quite a bit, part of her body. You later learn from a paper that there is a national tattoo convention going on the city, and so she must be a participant in that.

YWH Bless USA; a nation of cults, subgroups, tribes that can gather around any and every possible thing: motorcycles, tattoos, stamp collections, various strains of music, various versions of YWH, i.e., houses of worship (few benign but mostly rabid, frothing at the mouth about how their Man is the man, and the rest all handmaidens of Satan. This is not a nation that is going to dogs, as the certain people with certain political beliefs would have you believe, but to just as dangerous gods. Devil take both dog and god!) etc.

[14] There are thoughts that run through your head as you walk down Broadway: a card in the game of Monopoly finally has risen from the dead. And like anything that might rise form the dead, it crumbling and rotting and giving off heavenly perfume of sweat. Resurrected anima would be like this, not dressed in some fair garb, as all iconology would have one believe.

You amble along people speaking in tongues, arguing, standing around vacantly, women careening down the sidewalks dressed in high fashion (why does it appear that New York has more creatures of the female kind than elsewhere? Is it because of the human density? Is it because you can’t avoid them as elsewhere?). Watching, absorbing, polishing the bearings of your neck to a high shine as it spins around and around, a carousel, you come to the bookstore that a friend has recommended to you.

[15] Wonderland. Temple. Faire Grounds. Dump of glitterbones. This city is apparently a shopping haven – you wouldn’t know because nothing else matters for you but this, this bookstore. You ricochet from shelf to shelf till you end up in the poetry section. You grab a ladder from a nearby aisle and begin your raid. The pile builds up, book upon book, a tottering tower of desire; that desire to gnaw everything down to the bone. Language, that tricky bitch, however keeps slipping on your tongue like quick silver, like falling rain, like the unattainable paradise of a dream.

You know you don’t have the wherewithal to buy all these, and even if you did your legs are not strong enough (Hemingway’s dictum wasn’t it? That to write one must have strong legs etc) to lug these around the walks that remain yet to be taken. So you spend the next half hour sorting and shuffling the stack like a pack of cards. You put the final pile on your head and sashay down the cashiers, so chic and all that, and put down the cash, stuff the geese down into your backpack and step out into the rush hour. Get your ass moving or the human torrent would knock you down. Praise the Lord.

[16] You get down into the belly and catch the train south to Brooklyn Bridge: a bridge of desire, of fog stealing over it on cat paws, of suicidal poets who twanged it like lyre to make word music, come Hart, come Walt, come Wystan, you come too hombre Federico Garcia, to this thing of mind arching between where one is to where one wants to be.

Also a bridge of stone and steel wire, also a bridge of tourists with snub nosed cameras, with bazooka cameras, a bridge of bicyclists, runners, roller skaters, of cars flowing underneath from Man-hat-tan-o to the outer isle of Brook-lyn-ne, one male, the other female, those metallic spermatozoa.

[17] You sit on a bench roughly in the middle of the Bridge letting you eyes rest, and feet rest too. Could Buddha have attained enlightenment under one of the end towers of the Bridge? Can you be illumined here? But for now no thought for a while. You then get up and wander over to the Brooklynne side: underneath wharves, brick buildings, a sort of a run down look in general. Behind you meanwhile are the towers of Manhattano throbbing with the pulse of currencies, and the setting sun.

You wander through the stylishly gentrified streets of Brooklyn Heights, where Auden lived, where Mailer lived, and which now, from all the Hun tanks parked in the streets, appear to be too expensive for writers to live anymore. Here is the church from where Abolitionists, those goddamned Yankees to all Southerners, railed against the stain of slavery, the stain that will never be atoned for it can’t be atoned for. Thinking these thoughts you reach the promenade overlooking the East River.

[18] The sun is now completely hidden behind the spires of the Lower Manhattano. It shines through skeletons of glass, as if it is x-raying the buildings for some forgotten tumor. Lady Liberty in the distance, waving her wand of light (which is also now nearly a big nothing, given how damned hard it is to get into the promised land) at tugs, coast guard speed boats, lights coming on here on the shores of Brooklynne, Manhattano, and in the far distance Jersey Cow.

You sit on the bench breathing the cold water air that is blowing into your face, and kissing your body through the thin rain jacket you are wearing, alternately reading Milosz’s meditations on Chinese hermit poets, watching dogs and dogwalkers, the changing of guard on the horizon, the incoming dark, the web of solitude, the wedding cake lights of Brooklyn bridge to your right, and then right ahead at the confluence of two rivers, Husdon and East, the slick glittering tongue of Manhattano drinking. In India all confluences of rivers are considered especially holy. Isn’t this too a holy confluence then, yes the holy confluence of dollar and man!

[1] The dense summer grows all around, Pressing its evergreen face to the windows, As it coaxes daylilies, daisies & dahlias Out from the wet earth into a thirsty air. And birds having built their nests in spring Are busy hop-hunting insects in the grass.

[2] This room is empty. This room is full of Books, is full of sweat, is full of longing. Emily looks at you with her one working eye, Her clumped hair dropping over your sheets in Tufts, and her smile becoming more crooked Every morning you reluctantly wake clutching Her, to stare into your empty days, empty fate.

[3] Everything has to have a symbol, a shorthand. Take the seasons. Say autumn. We can speak Of the autumn wind and that restless stranger Who keeps walking up and down the avenues Amidst the ragged orchestras of leaves, looking For some long lost score, when kissing turned Almost fecund, ending in a crescendo of promise.

[4] You are that stranger. This is your absent music. And Emily is a doll who won’t ever call your name. It is that time when you must change your life.