Way

One way: I watch you ask 

each hunger for a name, 
then stay masked

and shy away
 

One more way to your woe
from the jinx of diaspora
its sudden tomorrows

and kind decay

They say the universe's

reasons are mysterious
but that's not reason--
so... anyway

---------------------

I made myself go outside for half-an-hour this afternoon because it looked so beautiful and temps were all the way up in the 60s. It was lovely. I watched cardinals and robins and finches drinking from the pond... The water looks so dank; I'm a bit worried for them. 

Mothering

Scout finds his water dish 

empty, he reminds me to 

fill it by batting it around.

Like every other toddler 

he eagerly loses himself

in all the glorious noise:

he's cocking his head

and bouncing his dish--

my little drummer pup.

Now I bring him 

a new bowl of water 

and he flings himself

into it, lapping, slurping, 

I'm stroking his head,

and my old body forgets 

it did not birth him--breasts 

spread like wings, tingling

like they did when I fed babies. 

An Equinox

 

I am everything today
I have broken the day
I have baptized plants
I have balanced time
on top of a tiny cloud

I have bled from anger
broken all our sorrows
O child--I have bitten
truth from my tongue
waiting for your love 

[My birthday plants--roses from LB, orchid from EM--are blooming!]

Evening

I relive volumes about preserving all these hours
as though a summer's worth of sweetness swims

under the surface in the hopeful brine of memory. 

What if there are instructions to make the moment?

What if I practiced each moment before it came--

in the long, lonely present, folding in love, alone...

Open to my destiny as a nomad in this desired body,
understanding? O, I would say in wonder and dismay, 

returning over and over again like a peal of laughter.

Arrangement

I am buttoned tight inside a world

made mostly of sounds and words

for my name will soon get forgotten

you may add small tears to the sea,
to the wind, all the liminal seasons
don't wear out my name with wails

I started my own tribe of wanderers 
who'll need my name for new ways,

promises, festivals, and kindnesses

anniversary

Twelve months in--hopeful 

and messy with tenderness

a windy, wingless sky and I

my mother and another ask

if I mean to be alone in snow
as time ripens, holding me in

a clamoring for brightness, yet 
as I add in days by the handful
they grow distant, dimming in  

history: years, people, places...
it has been such a long journey 
surely, it wasn't all just to die?

Run Run

I am taken in welcome, the other side beckons, 

but this side waits: like picnic, parachute, seed 

for the perfect moment of expectation and need.

Will you go with me and be my love, be a love?

--The blur of the future is just our pasts outrun

come, the world turns bright for many reasons,

the way is notable, though earth lies wrinkled--

Little beasts; running thundering and carefree,

When will you choose? Would you choose me?

____

C with Scout and Huck on a pandemic-style puppy playdate.

whirlpool

When each glance is visitation

howling histories of trespass 

you climb into every boat

rocking the ebb of panic

the flows of despair

hoping for survival

A cataract at our junction of

citizenship and humanity

that you are makes us all 

fragile--an insecure craft 

whose soft capsizing 

powers us to revolt

Most recently this, but really an ongoing and unmitigated concern.

(Photo: Moore Park with BS)

luminate

At this join, I think to say who 

I am, but have softly rotting

forgotten 

in clusters of contrapuntal 

pleasure--urgent, charmed

reachings

until I'm arriving like a light

rippling rings of experience,

chiming-- 

not now, not enough--so gaudy, 

so greedy, and ekphrastic from

imagining

(Baker Woods with L)

hard scrabble

I see the river has flatlined

I did not intend, I did not

think to do it on my own

to on my own

run: around, out, away

As if the sun floats belly up 

and if I can do it, my darlings

if I can do it, why can't I?

Why can't I 

check: list, mate, out 

(Red Cedar, MSU Riverwalk) 

Wrecking Crew

                                            1

you talk like therapy                    I aim like an arrow

slipping sleeping pills                   then crash like a bomb

in between sentences                  like a stupid mecha god

                                           2

buried in the fizz                          we're hard to imagine

in far-off messages                      but echoes keep finding us--

from baby monitors                      like they're rescue dogs

                                         3

       I still don't know if          I should forgive you

        I still don't know if         I need to be forgiven

thoughts/prayers

shifting from kind sleep 

to the louder comfort 

of that old loneliness

 the bright, uneven burn 

of acceptable syllables,

premonitions of escape

Concise Bharatha

This isn't my birthplace and I am 

louder for my heart is misplaced;

I dwindle but first I do no harm.

Then I turn calm, you must come 

too--time shrugs on, on its own. 

*

He hugs the walls when he walks

my sister says of our dad.

We should have bars in the shower 

my husband says of my dad.

I think of my dad--

mightiest of his four brothers

how he sat all his brothers on his 

meaty biceps--or was that Bhima

also second-born--I'm confused

by the words rolling in my mouth.

*

It's easy to break, ask water--what's 

next in the shadow of time's coming.

Of first learning to trust every day's 

ordinary dance, stepping to calm, 

to harm; saying: I'll take it.

--------------------------

Notes: 

My father actually has six brothers, but my youngest uncle is seventeen years younger than dad and so the five older brothers were routinely referred to as the Pandavas in dad's childhood. Dad, although affected by polio as toddler, was somehow also the strongest and sportiest brother--captain of several teams in both school and college. 

I routinely confused stories about dad and Bhima when I was a kid. Still do. I don't know if seating all the brothers on his arms was a dad thing, a Bhima thing, or a dad thing inspired by Bhima... and I'm not going to try to find out. Naturally, I was shaken when my sister told me this morning how weakened he's become because he looks not very different in photos and when we video chat. 

The Mahabharatha because it is so long (the longest!) and has so many embedded frametales sometimes works on me as a reminder of how life is transient. Lives get lost in that huge narrative, and somehow recognizing individual insignificance is calming? Here, I'm reaching for an abridged version of that fatalistic calm.

Distance is a huge in the pandemic, and I yearn to see everyone 'back home' knowing it may not happen for months or even this year. So the other part of what I was trying to do was to call back to the old country "Bharat/Bharatha."

in carnations

Yes, I am almost lost in

this small, intimate forest 

from the supermarket florist

(carnations I bought myself).

I embrace their candy beauty

how gracefully their economy

aligns ( just so you know--

they must have cost <$7.99).

I address their bodies with 

eye caresses, knowing the dears 

may last for weeks--or for ever 

(if you're counting in flower years).

Shorts/Shrugs

Morning:

I asked my mentor 

to send gifts of time

(I have no mentor)

(I barely have time)

Noon:

if the moment comes 

it will be innominate

when the cure comes

I'll seem unsentimental

Night:

we think only of bones 

now afloat in this stew

while we thank the flesh 

caught anew in every bite

now you see it / then you won't

cradle this role

of an unnamed 

creature in our

unreal world

dead branches 

offer backbone

roots open into

constellations

in snowy filaments

of tired memory

you tried to believe

in figments I know 

afterwards/afterwords

our arc bends 

from the brutality 

of everything we

carry, when only 

fragments of story

are ours to control 

We know we are every

-one, belong every

 

place, matter some

-times in epilogue

Blues

I still thoughts 

by will alone

I carry sadness

into February

sky stays blue 

as I grieve you

understory

I reach for the halo

orbiting our moon

lasso and escape

loops of memory

I enter at beauty--

of enflamed skies 

chevron trees stare

back, draw me stars. 

Ashtanga

My form is a machine                                                 My breath is punctuation                  

it will work all day                                                       pretending to be a landfill   

on knots of goodbye                                                   of commas, frozen periods;   

              

--going, going, gone--                                                  it  turns up the light, keeps 

hard to say--if that's                                                     inky spaces of silence and    

even--home? heaven?                                                 whispered sleep to myself    

also, which way home                                                 looks me in the eye, parses

--the world is so small                                                 the dirge of a sigh, impresses

yet full with forgetting                                                  the stray forevers of my lips