Aesthetic Knowledge


These are the practices of bodily art—
Burn an almond, collect the soot, mix it with butter.

Enter a cloud
And things are blotted out, ruins restored

So landscape becomes us,
Also an interior space bristling with light.

Have you seen the calendar picture?
Tears from the domes, like droplets of milk

So memories consume a broken mosque.
We are creatures of this world

An invisible grammar holds us in place.
When God shows his face

Even mountains start to blaze.
Burnt rock ground very fine

Becomes surma for the eyes, a divine blessing.
For my Dark Night series I used sumi ink

Culled from the soot of Japanese temples.
For Nur — my Blinding Light series —

Gold leaf pasted on paper,
Utterly fragile.

For Zarina Hashmi


Attar

Soon after we met you set a tiny bottle in my palm.
It had blue whorls and a gold stopper,

Glass blown in the furnaces of Hyderabad.
Open it you whispered,

They call it Attar of the First Rains on Dry Earth:
Pick a piece of wool cotton and pour a drop on it,

Then set it in the broken window frame:
Remember this is the odor of earth and air

This perfume summons souls.


Darling Coffee

The periodic pleasure
  Of small happenings
Is upon us—
  Behind the stalls
At the farmers market
  Snow glinting in heaps,
A cardinal its chest
  Puffed out, bloodshod
Above the piles of awnings,
  Passion's proclivities.
You picking up a sweet potato
  Turning to me — This too? —
Query of tenderness
  Under the blown red wing.
Remember the brazen world?
  Let's find a room
With a window onto elms
  Strung with sunlight,
A café with polished cups,
  Darling Coffee they call it.
May our bed be stoked
  With fresh cut rosemary
And glinting thyme,
  All herbs in due season
Tucked under wild sheets
  Fit for the conjugation of joy.


Little Burnt Holes

Stiff legged, my head and throat so cold, I quit the jury selection
  room.

I dream of a shop with red velvet curtains where hats the color of
  bark lie on the counter,

The hat I want is cut of mink, fit for a brutal season. It has prickles of
  fur, dirt colored like the faces of prisoners afloat in the courtroom,

Like the wool Basho wrapped around his throat when he called on
  the Lady of Trees.

All night she sits under a wild flowering tree, ready to judge both the
  quick and the dead.

She has a son who breathes fire. Basho whispers to me: In your
  country they fill the prisons with dark folk, that's all they care
  about.

Outside the courtroom, on Center Street, a cold wind rips the scarf
  off my head, blinds me.

At night I see the Lady of Trees. She pulls out a handkerchief, makes
  her fire-breathing son stop and blow his nose.

Sparks waltz. Her muslin is spotted with little burnt holes.


Debt Ridden

Who are we?

Something was hopping
Up and down in my throat
  O bullfrog

By the stream
Where I was born.

How did we get here?

My mother had a pink
blouse

Over it her sari.

Something

Was torn.

  At first she owed nothing.
Then the sky put paid to us

The wind altered itself
And set us all on fire.

For Nell Painter


Indian Ocean Blues

L'hibiscus qui n'est pas
autre chose qu'un oeil eclaté.
—AIMÉ CÉSAIRE


Shook Silver

I was a child on the Indian Ocean.
Deck-side we dance in a heat-haze,
Toes squirm under silver wings.
Under burlap someone weeps.

Amma peers out of the porthole
Sari stitched with bits of saffron
Watch out for flying fish,
She cries.

Our boat is bound for Africa.
They have goats and cows just like us,
Also snakes that curl
Under the frangipani tree.

Remember what grandmother said?
If you don't keep that parasol
Over your head
You'll turn into a little black girl.

Where is she now,
Child crossing the livid sea?
Older now,
I must speak to the shadows.


Human Geography

Out of the belly of stone
India pours,
Wild grass is torn
From its roots.

On broken rock
Your face is etched in shadow.
Is this what love does —
Sempiternal marking?


Song Lines

One sea
Leads to another
(O mirror drunk with salt)
Also to that dreamless sleep

Where all seas start.
On this North American coast
Birch trees swallow the wind
Ranunculus petals tumble

In the heat of spring.
We shut our eyes to the glare
Stumble into the hole
Where Sita lay:

Eye of heaven, earth's soul.
After the trepidation of rocks
After burst blood vessels
Will fields of saxifrage

And self-heal bloom?
Girls gather in sunlight,

Perch on a fault mass
Combing out their hair.


Studio

I was on an island where few birds call.
Old trees swirled in the wind

The door to my studio tore off
Stones struck clouds, church bells echoed

— Earthly unsettlement.
Forced to go on, what did I do?

I pulled down a wall,
Set up another with pasteboard

Tacked a strip of mirror all along the floor
Till white plaster was afloat, gravity unhinged.

The lights I had set up fell to one side,
I...