Dharwar railroad tracks chant for Mehboob Khan

Night of throbbing stars
of the drum in the distance
of the last door left ajar
of the smell of burning incense

Night of imagined dawn
of baby’s screams driving mommy crazy
of disoriented birdsong going on and on
of cholera’s itineraries

Night of Vedic stock exchanges
of five-star hotels in mango seeds
of the Gods’ rampages
of the starving’s dinner of cow feed

Night of the landowners’ dance of death
and of the birth of insurrectionary rhyme
which loathes the colonization of the parrot’s breath
by the robotizers of human time

-- from What the Bird Tattoo Hides: The Vijaynagar Notebooks . . . poem composition date / 1973

The poem is a product of the body’s motions

-- for instance, the way
the muscles tighten as one relocates the large brass pot

from near the door to under the sink, or the chemical
discharge’s silent leap

from one nerve-ending to another
in the brain

as the mind starts its appraisal
of the tamarind tree’s crooked but perfect ascent, & then later

there’s the chest’s heaving in and out as one climbs
a hill during an evening walk that leads first

to Ganeshpur Rd. and soon, a half kilometer away, to a woman
crushing sugarcane in a presser near

the old water tank at the military compound’s
western edge, from where

looking down into the valley one sees
houses everywhere, which is when

without any plan to do so the body
slows to a standstill, the poem at last complete.

-- from What the Bird Tattoo Hides: The Vijaynagar Notebooks . . . poem composition date / January 2007

A Type of Birth*
for J. P. Dancing Bear

You're right, in the painting
it was a foggy night.

And regarding the other matter, yes, I do
want to share more
of myself.
But this way? By traveling

in the imagination
through "the thinning air"
to the moon
"with its

millions of years of dust"? I love
the thought, but . . . In the painting
you showed me
the mis
leading stairway goes

not to the moon
but through it, then

- navigating
the endless traffic
at an intersection of lifetimes -

slowly reenters me down there at the base
of the spine, which is
the last flight to be climbed. But already
by that time I'm no longer

the same. Everything I do
is too
lyrical now, infused with

the puma's silence, the lungs' rhythm, the curve
of space, and moon craters that are like
sculptures of synapses as imagined
not by a sculptor but by

the synapses themselves. And so
having finally ascended within the spine
I'm here again in the brain looking out

at a green moon
in blue light. Is it really
possible to be this unweary after seeing

this much?
I'm so alert I'm not even

me anymore, but my mother
in her wheelchair
in the kitchen, gazing out

the window and taking note
of everything, regardless
of whether it is motionless or on
the move. You couldn't

have known this but
I'm sharing it with you
because you wrote.

* written a month ago