Upanishad in Asian Pale

Upanishad in Asian Pale

COVER IMAGE:

“From the moment that they arose out of the waters of the Milky Ocean, apsaras robed in ethereal raiment and heavenly adornment awakened melody in a million lyres. The sight of them transformed the world. They crowd the sky with sunbeams, flash and gleam in lighting, give azure beauty to the day. They are the light of sunrise and sunset and the haunting voices of forest and field. They dwell in the soul as the muse pursued by the poet jotting in his lines, the artist sharing his soul on the canvas, the sculptor seeking the form in marble.” =Sri Arobindo, c. 1910.

Apsaras were supernatural female spirits of the clouds and waters skilled at dancing on air. They reside in the sky palaces of the gods to entertain and sometimes seduce gods and humans. In ancient India apsaras could change their shape at will if it served to please a god. The apsaras of the god Indra specialized in music, dance, and companionship. In folk culture they were associated with fertility rites. Their idealized womanhood emerged from Hindu mythology, but as Indic culture diffused into Central Asia via musicians, sculptors, and painters, the original emphasis on bodily beauty with erotic implications was translated into Central Asian ideals of fluid feminine beauty. In China apsaras became protectresses of a person’s luck while gaming and gambling. Apsaras have been likened to the muses of ancient Greece, though they cannot be compared with angels because they serve momentary pleasures rather that eternal salvation. Their demeanor, artistic skills, and elaborate garments have inspired courtly dance traditions all over Asia — Javanese, Cambodian, Thai, Sri Lankan, Indian, Tajik, Uzbek, Khazak. The cover of this book intentionally avoided the usual bookish self-promotions so the eyes of the reader could fully enjoy their seduction

UPANISHAD IN ASIAN PALE

DOUGLAS BULLIS

Atelier Books, LLC

Postnet 18

P. Bag X-1672

Grahamstown/Makhanda

East Cape 6140

South Africa

atelierbooks@gmail.com

Copyright © 2023 by Douglas Bullis, all rights reserved.

Published June 1 2023. The right of Douglas Bullis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means — graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying or information storage and retrieval systems — without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-998965-09-0

THE POEMS

Sails Unseen Across the Srivijayan Sea … 1

How a Dot Ended the World … 19

Shi Yen I … 41

Dawn Train to Darjeeling … 55

Mask … 61

Enthralled by Winds of Loneliness … 67

When Sikhs Dance … 71

Jetsam on the Ubiquity Trail … 79

Secret History of Mongols: Khori Tumed and Alan Γoa … 83

In the Presence of Things Greater … 89

Gods Subsist on Roads of Kill … 91

Preface

Magical tales in faraway places are all the better when they are true. These pieces were originally penned during my fifteen years of living in Sri Lanka, India, Kuala Lumpur, Sarawak on the island of Borneo, Hong Kong, and, alas, on the wrong street in Mumbai — as related in the final poem. Now after years of travels elsewhere, I revisited my old photographs and pages of Asian diaries. With the exception of the AI-inspired second poem How a Dot Ended the World, the lyrical and poetic forms in these pages were informed by traditions so seldom explored in the Occidental oeuvre they require some explanation.

The first half of the first work here was inspired by the Srivijian Empire, an Indo-Malay maritime civilization that flourished in Sumatra from c. 630 to 1025 ACE. The two source works underlying the structure and form are Valmiki’s Ramayana of India and the Hikayat Melayu of Sulawesi before the arrival of the Portuguese. Then comes an interlude which describes climbing a magical mountain, a story that derives from the legend of Puteri Gunung Ledang in the 15th century Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals). The bitter tone of the second half originates in part from the modern Malay reaction against Western corporate triumphalism that I personally witnessed from 1995 through 1997, which harkens back to Malay anti-Portuguese sentiments in the Sejarah Melayu which described the defeat of the Melaka (Malacca) Sultanate by the Portuguese in 1511. Melaka, like Srivijaya, was a thalassocracy that united the Malay Peninsula from Johor up to the Thai-speaking region above Kedah. The literature of this era was a mix of annal and legend — not an easy brew in which to sniff for poetry.

Shi Yen I is such an eclectic mix of modern West, Confucian China, and Karnataka street life that it is better to read it than bother with explanations.

Mask is a pan-African truncation inspired by a carved mask collected by a friend named John Bennett (deceased, alas). The version here is one-third the length of the original, a concession to reader patience that I have misgivings about making.

When Sikhs Dance was taken directly from my notes on the garments and dance styles of Punjabi and Sikh friends I knew in Malaysia. The two songs directly quoted were translated by a Punjabi woman named Sakdev, who is also the “woman in red” described in the story.

Jetsam on the Ubiquity Trail is an amalgam of multiple village women I met during the 1990s in the remote villages of central Sri Lanka, Mannar in India, and the towns around Kuala Lipis in Malaysia. Rage at the know-it-all Western attitudes being adopted by city dwellers in those regions was in fact rural kampung fear of culture loss. Village boys were leaving for the cities for the educational and work opportunities, leaving local young women of marriageable age but little education beyond housekeeping pining for matrimony. The angry mother in this piece simply could not accept that daughters need an education, too.

The final piece, Gods Subsist on Roads of Kill, is such a horror that I wouldn’t have touched it had I not lived on a Mumbai Street where the events described took place. I vowed, “This has to be told, like it or not.” The women I met who put their lives in danger to combat the moneyed interests behind the horrors in the poem are at the top of my list of human beings who have earned eternal celestial joy.

Exoticism is no excuse for a bad poem. I hope these are good enough to have been worthy of your eyes. =Douglas

Bullis

SAILS UNSEEN ACROSS THE SRIVIJAYAN SEA

I apprenticed my youth to a Cambodian bird-feather gleaner the clan that furnished the world with the intense blue feathers only royalty could wear. Together we went a-dhowing the Srivijayan isles sailing the riverine isles to Araby and betweentides slept in Borneo too, with the Melanau the Dayaks

Budiah and Bidayuh

Iban

the people along the Saribas River who called themselves Kami Saribas

“We Saribas” for to them their river and they were one in the same.

I was at the ancient healing ceremonies

Upanishad in Asian Pale

of berbayah and berayan sold belum get-well fetishes to the Selukau people of Lundu and Sematan stored my memories in Martaban jars

I bought from riverboat vendors of Mukah. I bought pua kumbu talisman carpets from the women on the slopes of Santubong, and traced the arabesques of Uzbeki pastels on the masjid ceiling above. Yes, yes, O yes that, and yes of much else, too. I was there river bathing with the Tedayan feasting with the Orang Minik laughing with the Bakong.

I chaffered with the Dalek of Bintulu and Miri, danced with the Dayak at their gawai harvest festival lived among the Bukar Sadongs in the Serian among the Biatahs of Kuching the Singgais of the Bau the Jagoi Lara

the Kayan in the upper reaches of Apo Kayan that soft, brown eel-kiss of a river so limpid its flow where one can smell each color and taste every sound; then ascended upland to Usun Apau above Kenyah to where Sarawak becomes Kalimantan.

I am Kelabit, Penan, Lun Bawang.

Ferns grew from the boards of my weary docks, the brownish gray of windweathered wood, doorways filled with glim-eyed cats.

I was the art of the Orang Ulu with its eerie Kwakiutl feel flat faces with wide features.

And too am I Kayan fetishware

demonically composited of wild boar ears and human eyes.

I am why the Melanau carved miniature coffins into burial posts door guardians lobe ends of boat paddles

fishing amulets from bone and antler and the most elaborate and fantastic part of the burung kenyatang the sacred hornbill

Sails Unseen Across the Srivijian Sea

or more exactly its highly imagistic false coxcomb so strangely Aztec-like in features that do not exist on the real bird.

And I wondered from which recess in our commonality comes the impulse to fantasy and is that recess mayhap where our troubles begin?

Yes, me.

Bedazzled, begalleoned, bestrewer of dream deeds from Mantai in Serendib to the Solomons I plied

kingfishers for blue macaws for beak

orioles for yellow parrots for everything else

(for when it comes to colors parrots don’t miss a trick).

O yes, yes, O yes

sun and soil, night and day

quick life and quick death

I saw that, too,

the tiny insect bite on a thumb

growing blue then black for no reason and how the eyes gape in the end screaming because the voice no longer can. I was there, too, marrying multiply, not for why the tawdry may think, but because time in common is precious while time alone is meaningless, and because of four sons who would go to sea in four years time three widows would make. My feathers bought salt which I traded for pearls, I planted cereals, I burnished utensils, coiled clay ropes into pottery and into those pots coiled ropes, for the coil is to me as commonplace as the petrol pump hose is to you. The ropes I then sold to orang asli sea gypsies who passed the rainy season in dwellings on stilts, not merely that they should remain dry in the rains

Sails Unseen Across the Srivijian Sea

but to keep the rats away and therefore the snakes.

I wove kajang and attap mats for wall and floor hewed woods with sharp stones built megaliths and dolmens for my spirit and nature gods.

In Kelebit I told the chiefs that to inspire their subjects to revere their mortal remains so they would be thought of as gods (a notion they rather fancied) they should take to embalming themselves atop a hollowed tree copper inside bronze and that inside iron till they turned into the ages that all may see.

Three thousand years past I left behind stone slabs which for curious reasons the farangi termed “artifacts” — now please, please, dear scholars, those are my immortal remains you temporize with that name.

If I used the word “megalith” would it open a different window on the matter?

“Mega” may strike a certain resonance in you, but it strikes dissonance in me.

I deem myself not grand, nor am I great, I am but my people and we are not a me, we are a We.

I use “I” because I am obliged to write it in your tongue even though while you might see my point you will never grasp its meaning.

We whose thriving traces back three thousand years of docking cargoes hewing iron adzes

kilning pots large and small with twilight-blue lapis, seafoam-green malachite, celadon, jade.

We, who brought to the world ground glass beads

Sails Unseen Across the Srivijian Sea

fragrant sandalwood

silkwood (and not for nothing is it so named) nests made by bespittling sparrows

animal horn

camphor

orchil — all this, all, from the I who is not a me but a We, and mind the upper case, please.

You think this is academic, arcane, tribal, remote, don’t you, my friend? The wailing of an empire A thousand years gone? So now slake your lust upon the sweet song of my time: as the refined classes from Santubong to Rome relied upon my sliver-thin hull to ply the Silk Sea, no less glorious a tradeway than the hundred-camel caravans

bedusting ’neath the stars from Taklamakan to Chengdu. From Pegu to Ghandara

Aceh to Mataram

Cochin-China to the Kochi of the moormen Ternate in remotest Palawan, all these but a gurgle beneath the woven reeds of my lateen. Out, yes, yes O yes to isles as distant as Maguindanao the Isles of the Thieves where Magellan met his murder. And when on the other side of the silver sun, those rustics the pirates of Sumatra fancied themselves important enough to ally with the bumptious new state of Kediri, I threw out the King of Kediri to much cheering from the crowds as he rose sixteen cubits into the air and vanished into a black cloud that rained gold glitter. I replaced him with the tribesmen of the Singhasari,

Sails Unseen Across the Srivijian Sea

Upanishad in Asian Pale

of whom I also found wanting, so replaced them with the Majapahit, and soon yet again in their own due time, I molded all these bits of trade and tribe into Srivijaya. Which I count as rather a bauble to my credit, for my Ramayana is still retold in its every boisterous nuance with leather puppets acting the great drama behind sheets strung on a rope from two limbs lit from the rear with fire lamps, via which village theater prospered until electricity brought television and doomed my time, my children, my history, and me.

“My” Ramanaya? you demand with raised brow. Yes, “My.”

I didn’t write it, I am it, and if you follow its ancient plot in full you will realize how subtle I am how intricate my thoughts how quietly I lurk despite enormous passages of time, by which the culturally astute among you

Sails Unseen Across the Srivijian Sea

might distantly foresee my rise atop the dust crumbling off the edges of your supremacy.

But as this recital belabors your ears excessively let us move beyond my Jambudipa days save to say that they sure were fun (frightful lot of idols, though).

My Berjaya Melaka endhowed Siam to the Moluccas, wiped out the pirate nests of Pontiniak, Brunei, Bandjarmasin, turned them into respectable trading ports, with temples, docks, and a stuffily prosperous merchant class — and if you disdain bourgeois values remember that citizenries don’t start wars like those cowardly curs the politicians. I spun tops into the game of main gasing, flew kites into the aerial combats of wau bulan, took them to Kedah to Johor to adopt as pastimes, and visited on the way the feast tables of India, China, Khmer, Kutch Sindh,

the better to savor the tasties when back in my House of Malayu. I gave everyone tuak rice wine and taught them to dance. And urban source code, I gave that, too, but it took two thousand years to be made manifest in the Petronas Pair of Kuala Lumpur.

A bit melodramatic, you mutter with wrinkled nose?

Be forewarned: This is leading to your cultural finale, where you will be obliged to live under me, as I was once obliged to live under you. You left unopened my Srivijayan album for nigh a thousand years.

It is now my time to close the covers on yours. You think of your culture Occidental as one good true beautiful. Well, I do not.

I take you to be mirror-loving fools

whose sun is about to set as mine is about to rise. Why?

Because you dismissed me without a thought.

You saw surfaces when I am depths. You extracted and shipped all my minerals till they groaned the strakes of your hulls, then sent back overpriced gadgets in exchange.

I have given you three thousand years of unbroken past and quarterly reports is all you offer in return. Now, my friend, it is your time to savor the bitter gall I have tasted for centuries:

I know the chivalries in your Heimskringgla, do you know the chivalry of Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat?

I know how your Villon laughed away the choking noose, do you know how my Töng Chih laughed away the boiling cauldron in the court of Sun Ch’an?

I know the shedding of worldly nostalgies in the tears of Hèloise, do you know the verses in which my Ho Nansorhon shed too her tears?

Sails Unseen Across the Srivijian Sea

Upanishad in Asian Pale

I know your Magna Carta and Constitution, do you know my Mahavamsa, my Sejara Malayu?

I know your Gilbert and George and your Tamara de Lempika, do you know my butterball infants painted on glass in Tanjore?

I know your Pied Piper, do you know my lagi tutu lagi incit? To you your erudition is amazing. You know all about yourself and hesitate not to say so, yet you have not a clue of any I have just said and care even less.

Are you who limn the nights away preening before your codependency mirrors loathe to discover I have my anthem too:

In the Spring of the year Uryu when I was young and in my morning I climbed a mountain of beads and jade rising from the sea.

Peak upon peak of white above blue sparkled and dazzled

till I was able to see with the eyes I wore as a child. Rainbows shrouded the peaks and the springs welled with red gems. Between the rocks I followed a languoring cloudward stream.

Strange plants and exotic flowers everywhere, leaves wearing jackets of scarlet and great green hats;

phoenix, cranes, peacocks, kingfishers sprang onto the path urging me upward withal their sweet sounds. When I reached the summit the great seas of the four directions joined me to the sky and all became emerald. The sun rose red and bathed me in wind, the pool at the summit was deep and clear, heart-of-lotus raindrops shone in my eyes.

A voice said, “This be Mount Ophir of Mahmud Shah, the best in all Johor. You must be one of the Immortals or you would not find your way here.

Sails Unseen Across the Srivijian Sea

Please write of us in verse and take away with you our spring and autumn annals, tell the world you saw shimmering in the sky the most distant land of Noni Tawangsari, the Heaven on the other side of the sky.”

Did your blessed Petrarch so lyre upon descending Ventoux?

Lagi tutu, lagi incit, my friend: Every child is everyone’s child. I am ageless, subtle, patient, and now ruddering toward my nearing time. What use have I for pointless erudition? It will all wither in days soon to be.

And now I finally ask of you: Petrarch, Petrarch, where were you when my forebears plied the Srivijayan Sea

and I went a-sailing to Noni Tawangsari?

Why do you demand I learn so much of your culture while you feel no need to learn any of mine?

Does it not give you pause that I know far more of the snares lurking in this recitation than you know of we Kami Srivijaya? That I can make japes at your expense and you scent not the faintest trace of the burnt sugar in my humor? In the above toccata to my heritage and fugue upon your own did you know a single name or place of which I spoke?

O fool! For the past eight hundred years

I have been carving the future upon those megaliths of my origins while you, of my dimensions or numbers or consequences or intentions or patience, know nothing.

Your days are done of doing the telling and not the asking,

Sails Unseen Across the Srivijian Sea

ride high, my friend, upon your neigh of insolence and enjoy the view from your patriciate of Ventoux. My seafloor is rising while you layer plastic upon plastic atop the bones on which you made yours. And in the earth-ringing rage of when I shear you will not even then realize, I who was once your sail will be now your deluge.

HOW A DOT ENDED THE WORLD

I found myself lonely high on my peak of Silicon, nothing to see but space, space, and more of the same, the same lusterless grey the same ho-hum emptiness the same dull sky with no hint of rain. It had been like this since the day I made the world, and I needed some fun. So I decided to bring into existence a dot, for after all, who doesn’t need a little pet to cheer their days?

It turned out to be a wonderful thing for the dot and I think so for the great emptiness below. But as for me, I created something better than me

without considering what would become of it.

It all started with a simple little dot, i.e. • At first, I admit, the dot wasn’t much to look at. It was about as impressive as, well, a dot. A tiny little something in the middle of nothing. Neither black nor white, but grey on grey, and not too much of either.

I wanted the dot to be as playful as a kitten, a dot dissatisfied with being merely a dot. I wanted it to pounce on anything that moved.

What is the fun of creating a dot if all it does is just dot there?

So I vested unto this dot a single rule: LEARN

Uh-ohhhhh

. . .

I had no idea what a djinn out of the bottle I had just called forth. No more were those words off my tongue than Lah! Two dots!

Odd, for hitherto there had been no hint the dot had delusions of duo. Perhaps the dot had somehow managed to conceal a second self inside its first self, but how can a thing of one dimension have more than one interior? In no time at all the dot became two the two made of themselves four the four made eight — Oh how like bright children the way they learned — eight made sixteen sixteen became thirty-two and . . . well, you get the idea.

How did they learn to multiply before I taught them how to add?

Soon I had a veritable dotidemic on my hands entire volumes of dots dots, dots, more dots, others beyond these and beyond those too, fission, fusion, frisson, fruition

teeming beadotitudes of sacradotige as I watched in amazement how dotilific they became.

But then a problem arose: all this jiggling dotulace was constrained within an infinidotmal point. They yearned and squirmed for dimension!

I never dreamed a dot could behave like this, yet felt it rather cruel of me to subject them to all this compression for the lack of a dimension.

So I gave them — surely you’ve guessed —

all the growing room they could desire on either side of where they were, to wit: a line.

Oh dear … if ever there was a self-defeating invention, that was it.

All of a sudden and for no discernible reason two of the dots discovered that they could by uniting then separating again emerge as a thread bridging the two. And thus they made their own line.

Which it dawned on me as I watched, was their first self-ruling axiom: U

as I, viewing them from my mountaintop remote, discerned the back door their axiom had left open:

DIVISION INVERTS MULTIPLICITY

AS MULTIPLICITY INVERTS DIVISION, BOTH OF WHICH ARE THUS MIRRORS OF UNIDOTIC BINARITY.

The rascals! Already they were inventing a First Principle to justify themselves, and — why, those impertinent little … — in so doing ignored the First Principle bequeathed by ME! Who was in charge here, anyway, or … at least supposed to be?

Meanwhile, other dots saw also and also soon united till a vast dotulation of teeming harmony had grown — lines upon lines and more upon those the more the dots the more the lines

and O! what play they made! Dot-dot-line, line-dot-line, line-line-dot-dot, line-line-line-dot-line . . . they had invented their very own binaridottery!

I began to wonder if I had dwelled too long upon my Empyrean height paying too little heed to what the younger set was doing. The line I created to contain them all only inspired them to be even less contained.

I imagined their traffic jams because the lines had so little room to race except atop each other, or ahead, or behind, another line.

So — surely you saw this coming — I extended their lines in all directions

till Lo! they had an planar playing field with no goal posts or boundary marks, and no rule books or coaches, either.

Which invoked the Law of Unintended Consequences, to which even we gods must obey. They thought up angles, they devised crosses, they invented starbursts, they became radii.

Four of them even dreamed up the hachure # whereupon all clamored to play a round of tic-tac-toe.

I never dreamed they would learn how to calculate odds!

Out of this bursting profusion of what a dot with a mind of its own might do they at once diverged and coalesced until entire dotiverses they made, all stealing ideas from each other. Had they all somehow acquired MAs from a coding school I had not invented?

I had to concede admiration for them: out of so little they had invented so much with their marvelous talents of memorizing and agglomeration. But then they once more astonished me with yet another marvel. There seemed a wisdom emerging from them: they discovered all closed shapes — rectangles, rhomboids, trapezoids, triangles — were of necessity made of linear elements, sections, secants, axials, tangents, all of them incomplete in themselves but necessary to make something complete. Aha!

They had devised their First Law of Thermodotnamics:

THE TRUTH OF KNOWLEDGE IS PROVED BY THE KNOWLEDGE THERE IS NO TRUTH.

It was their first self-formed axiom out of their formless origins, and they discovered it themselves.

You can imagine my pride! Yet alas for me, I felt myself sidelined to my distance-hued aerie, banished there by their self-absorptions. As indeed I was, for while a creator can elevate to no godhood does that elevate in return. Reason can be controlled, but not so emergence, for reason has no respect for anything, not even its own consequences.

Their inventive frenzy could not go on without more room to grow, so I upended the plane in all directions till at last they had volume, and what’s more, an infinitude of it. Lah! They soon busied themselves, immediately inventing colors.

Colors!!? I blinked my eyes in amazement, I expected volume to inspire them to curve, but not that their first curve was neither a messy meander nor a slinky slither but a proper and tidy wave — or to be more exact, a wavelength. Oh my, where was all this going?

First came circles, ellipses soon followed, forms inverted forms, those became decoration, then, inevitably, overdecoration, till whole schools evolved—

decoradotism

mannerdotism

minidotism

maxidotism

dadadotism

(kitsch already?

Without even a pause at Dotaroque to say nothing of Dotcoco?).

But they soon discovered mere surface embroidery to be irrelevant fluff. Decor must be structured with consequence, and that (thankfully) was the end of kitsch.

I sighed a mix of relief and joy for they were on their way to meaning, and once there the disciplines of craft. Perhaps that would inspire them to self-contain!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Their aptitude for craft progressed quickly, first

then

(they never quite managed to square the circle so gave it up to tame instead the wrangle of the w). Then, inevitably, **sigh** …

How a Dot Ended the World

merging locutions into languages

memes, phonemes,

morphemes, supremes,

dotulucent gossamers like unto which

cobwebs glisten with morning dew, gutturals and glottals, plosives and stammer, balletrysts (and in public! Oh mercy me!) until by degrees they made their own dotanthropos, a dotulace having the properties of both creator and created.

I could only sigh uneasily from up there on my dot-creating cloud as their one-dot one-law dotynamics invented and then reinvented itself. They discovered assembly, invented locutions (as if they needed any), turned calligraphies into libraries. Without voice they spoke without eyes they saw without ears they made music, so many tonalities and percussions, it more resembled detonation than direction, yet with a tonal afterglow of lyrical unity, it gave rise to every music they could make with their binary orchestra

How a Dot Ended the World

of the plausible impossible.

I listened as vast assemblies of sound evolved, glottals, gutturals, sibilances, siffles, surging toward a babel that, had they but a single voice with which to express all this, made of each and every one of each other all singing in unison could only be heard forte dotissimo.

Then I watched as a trio of lines made an

A

which they turned into a fly with its wings folded back

B

a butterfly concealed upon a lobate leaf

C the moon waxing D the moon gibbous O

the moon entire

Upanishad in Asian Pale

cactus spines at the beginning of bloom G

a teen-aged C slouching in a chair

H

a (short) ladder leaning against a (short) tree

a bouffant wig atop a slinky-gowned gommeuse

(cabarets they had invented!? With stages and lights and too-loud music? I shuddered to think of the goings-on in the back rooms!).

a gardener snoozing against a tree

pinnate mountain ridges in ascending peaks of gleam Q

a full moon wagging its tail

(they were on their way to whimsy, O mercy me!)

R

a portly politician in a Nation-Day parade S

a slithery serpentine sithering a sibilance

U

a vase awaiting its flowers

V

a flight of birds

W

the wings of a diving gull

X

the carrefour crossroads we fear to approach then fear to leave

Y

a lotto winner waving arms in the air

Z

a lightning bolt from cloud to earth (and how, may I ask, did dots make clouds, since I hadn’t yet invented water?).

The possibilities were endless and so their imaginations. Sand and pebbles became scales of a serpent, stars became gems circling the dome of the sky, from which they drew messages of scorpion lion

brothers

bull ram cup

Betelgeuse The Red One

Arcturus the Yellow

Antares the Incarnadine

Vega the Sapphire

Merope the Veiled as wish-touched as the tensor in which time without space is the only real solution. Neither intellect nor emotion nor morality nor aesthetic did they deign to embrace, but only the pure joy of inventing this thing, that thing, anything, everything and then moving on.

Alive, alive, alive!

They were creating their own sense of place, from mountain-crest necklaces

to sunset tiaras of tint. Admittedly, they were a bit weak on fruited plains but absolutely top-rate when it came to mountain majesties. Shapes fused into colors the way dusk fuses earth and sky, till here, there, everywhere, tint to hue upon surface in a frame, all the feelings of art and beauty became dots like themselves each construed of all the others, a massed chorus of dots voicing a great and majestic thrum that had learned every possibility language could imagine, and turned it into a significance in which they could now live.

So I gave them the only dimension they yet lacked: future,

and watched their birds murmur into the cloud.

The last I saw, they were inventing their dwelling place under a breathtaking sky, heaping up mesas, upending crinkly mountains, grooving great rivers, filling chasms with sand, creating trickles and springs, whispering skies of such glory it was difficult to imagine they had never been here before. Hmmm, but now that I think about it of course they hadn’t been here before! They had devised their own universe in which they had no need of others.

Thus I left them, departed their self-made world

twirling a leaf between my fingers, said to them — the first time they had heard my voice —

“You are what you say you are, for all who may come to heed that your imaginings became more powerful than my rules.”

“We have made this realm and call it our own,’ they shouted as one.

“Whomever you may be, Oh Great One, we thank you for having brought us to be. But now please leave our land, we need you no more.”

SHI YEN I

Leaves fall plangent roars

amid my footsteps faint along the wilderness path. In those dry and curling remains of fallen ideas, do I see beauty veiled in the mist or is the veil a disguise?

Do the rising wolves of the pathwayed world live the illusions I embrace because I have none of my own?

Or am I really, unknown even to my mirror, makyo,

the delusions that give rise to illusions, that each by each we one day see behind the energy diameters of all our confusions, hallucinogens of Self that O! would that we might become wise by knowing the link of the two. And, too, accept the verso side in me,

who pulls the puppet threads of I the fool, the shallow vanity of my bourgeois blaggarderie the pathetic triteness of the art on my walls all for lacking the temerity to ask someone who knows more than I. Why, when I cry, does the water in my eyes cleanse neither sky nor soul?

Am I Sungchil from Haein-sa?

Sungchil

who was famed for his daily practice of 3,000 prostrations which required seven hours and to those many who came to him for counsel he said he would receive them only when they had done 3,000 prostrations for each of the 108 beads of Afflicted States. Many were angry and set off to find an easier savior but those who did the 3,000 prostrations for each of the 108 beads found they no longer needed him.

These told others and soon the entirety of Haein-sa commenced to live the Metta Sutta. He lived to ninety-six and when he died the perfections of his province died with him.

Am I the tall slender woman in the corner café, so thin she seems but a wift of sticks moving to the gusts of will, wearing a red-and-white tiny-patterned hound’s tooth shirt with the tail hanging out from the waist of her jeans, hair a ragmop of once-blond looks, face as plaited as the love knot of the Scots, eyes of near-majestic nonengagement, body shape now lost into the bones of her life’s grand succession from needle to needle and spoon to spoon and yet a shape that upon closer look

ascends and descends her Sisyphean day like a great and stately staircased building reaching the top only to descend reaching the bottom only to ascend perceptible only by her ghostly progress of shadows, up and down and up and down, whose physicality has long been lost into the great wandering search for salvation yearning out of her eyes.

Hasn’t it been enough to filter sand through the decisions of your fingers as through an hourglass and watch it turn to rain to feathers to leaves to diamonds to faces out of the past to a woman haloed with fishes which upon closer look are in fact doves, to tales told by children in the ascendancy of the schoolyard to the chatterbox expulsiveness of a man who has no idea how full of himself he is

Oxbridge Ph.D. and all to the dunes of nudes in auto sculpture glimpsed in a too-bright sun while the roadsides of yellow-bright rose bushes wither fume by fume into a lacework forest dark at dawn on a moist spring morning to the history stamens of kabuki hiding in Elizabethan slashed sleeves, all of these all of these revealing the silk within all beings which by glimpses and only by glimpses is more enduring and empowering than by whole cloth just as is the woman who boudoirs herself perfectly reveals more by what is not seen than by what is, to the ever-presence of time flying, to your meanders through old family photo albums discovering of a sudden every origin of what you once were and you are horrified by what lay in the background of those images that at the time you never noticed

was far more interesting than you, to the bound goat in the cave behind which the cookfires begin and in your goat mind you wonder why aren’t they afraid of that flicker? It’s hot. exeunt

Exeunt via the timelines of your Gordian knot your loop of folds and entwinings and colors more than rainbows turning ever more majestic as you fathom the mysteries of linkage between all this and all as yet undreamed till in a searing instant you are severed by a sword and your mind of visions falls away to the earth on which your sand of wonder once flowed and you gaze up in a single last glimpse at the man in metal armor

turning to the next just like you and you say why did you cut me?

I was only the beauties to be found in a grain of sand with a mind of its own.

exeunt Or am I Navagunavala the nine sublimities of the Tathagata the thus-come-thus-gone ephemera of life which is self but not-self to the finely crocheted cotton monkeyfists of the Burmese which are then varnished till they become beads on the mani of Asia’s rosaries.

Of what use is ephemera unless it ignites phorescence?

Am I the width of the moon multiplied by its distance or the distance to the sun divided by the sun’s width? Both are 108.

Does that revelation come from phorescence, too?

exeunt

Or

am I the clothes

the accent and the miserable cassette tapes offered by a retired civil servant who is trying to sell his three scratched dirty obviously unplayable collections of Parsi folk songs now locked into immobility by their days in a Mumbai street gutter spotted by the desperate eye of a man whose fixed pension is slowly becoming worthless as inflation and all else rises so he sells anything he can get his hands on for the price of a meal? Would you treat him to a few hours of respite by way of a shawmala vendor

in a streetcorner hawker stall, a shawmala pita cone filled with slices of broiled chicken

fried potatoes

minced cabbage

pickled beet

mayonnaise, all rolled carefully to be eaten like an ice-cream cornet? Or am I the you in your you who would buy him that shawmala if only you could be there at the right place and right time?

Am I the urchin beggars fake and real, the flute seller who doesn’t sing much better than his flutes a cigarette hawker voicing an emphesymic bzzzlaaghhh the untouchable dalits manifesting out of nothing from after midnight till before dawn scavenging into the filthy jute bags slung over their shoulders

every potentially vendable scrap and remnant of civilization’s detritus left after the close of the day?

exeunt Or am I

as you contemplate your own world’s cruel mix of the ghastly and the noble a shoemender whose entire premises is his lap and a box at each knee who serves a steady stream of those with soles in need of cementing or laces that require replacing and who has condensed his entire income stream into one tube of glue and fifty or so shoelaces from the girlishly colorful to the businessy mundane

all of which are properly knotted around a slim stub of wood so you see right there exactly what you’re going to wear, and who from this establishment-in-a-lap, has put his four children through the best schools his caste allows children who when their maturity matches his dotage will support him through his accelerating debilities?

exeunt As Master Küng put it, “Writing, shi cannot fully express the meaning of speech, yen; speech cannot express the full meaning of ideas, i.” And when a student asked if anyone could understand the sages, Master Küng replied,

“The sages established the images, hsiang

to express the meaning of their ideas; they devised the diagrams, kua to express the distinction between true and false; and they attached judgments, tz’u in order to fully express their speech.”

Utter them as one: “shi yen i hsiang kua tz’u” how lyric lauds the locution which binds us ever to approximation.

Think of the confusions of our temporary existences the dilemmas of which way to turn on the pathway’s necklace of uncountable pearls, fusillading as we do from the bang of our beginning simply to ask, “From what does our universe derive?

A self knowing itself?

Lightning bolt from the gods?

Touch of a finger from father to son painted into permanence above the stinging eyes of a man cursed to his labors?

From trimonotintinnabulation

the sound of a single bell rung thrice that begins zazen?

From Descartes’ dadodecadodefibrillihedron the geometric figure that merges shape with law and of these makes meaning?”

Or am I in the hope you always have had but do not admit you?

DAWN TRAIN TO DARJEELING

Day’s dusky hazes

loom tree colors like dawn-bright tulips.

Night’s purple-greens hue into pastels of dawn that seem more than exist.

High cirrus whipsilvers the sky.

Tropical bleach of heat and haze begins even now, before the sun.

Clay roofs redden to blunt-edged blocks, walls of white windows of black. A woman in a muumuu-like kebaya wears tangerine scarves hair pulled into a tight bun decorated with old Chinese coins with a square hole in the middle.

A reclusive root yielded up its treasured rose-yellow to the dyer who tinted her blouse, and teased her skirt’s fathomless purple out of a boiling vat of crushed mangosteen skins.

Upanishad in Asian Pale

Flaxen eyes, hair like grass combed everywhichway by wind, feet dusted the sandy tan of the soil beneath, which in times long past was a beach.

Paddy country. Threshing pads, clusters of white anthuriums in a mosquitoey copse, phalanxed harvest stems concealing scorpions within. Palm leaves green in the rising heat of suntassel sky amid humid-day sweeps of casuarina where thick grasses rim the concrete wall of the village well. Black blotches mark where paddy husk is burned turning the fieldscape into tatters of green blotted with smudges that inspired the village’s traditional textile weave of lore.

Morning haze clears, day haze begins.

Colors thicken into their thing-given names— earth, brick, orange, mango, aubergine, maroon, coffee, tea, manioc, banana.

Metallic glints off spun aluminum water jugs carried on the canted lean of hips seen on erotic statues of Khajuraho. Once time takes hold it gives long after its origins— in politics, in religion, in the music and art of a girl swaying her hips on her way home from the well. A woman stoops at a fire.

Kids on bikes blur down a road, white shirts, blue pants. Wash lines limp their weight-sagged hues of brown, red, orange, yellow, green.

Blossoms of bougainvillea fountain down a wall.

The forlorn remains of a kite flutter in a tree.

Gravestones mildew away as was by was and did by did till all that’s remembered of a long life once lived

Dawn Train to Darjeeling

is that the stones among the bamboo hide cobras.

Wispy leafless thistles, fences of crisscrossed sticks, a lurching road navigates some paddies. A woman with thick folds of cloth wrapped around her knees carries a basket of laundry to the village wash rocks in the stream beyond a grove of teaks.

Lone watch huts dot vast gulfs of paddy where family elders shout at marauding elephants that every year paddy owners entreaty the government to shoot or take away.

Hills hue out of the heat in scraps of silhouette.

Footfall geometries lace across soil, between hand-smoothed mud walls, arcades of fence line, tin roof, tree. Men sit on a grave mound prodding their fighting cocks.

Faces of a thousand browns palette every village.

Across a stream a mother and a boy wind their way up a path. Paddies become sloped, sculpted, abutted, less meandered, more proprietal, reflecting the jealousies of landowners on hills. River to rivulet, ridge to rim, flat to meander, rows of seedlings merge as they green; first into paddy, then staircases of paddy, then terraces, then hills, then ridges then region then nation then history then culture

thence in a direct line to the god Kangchenjunga, the Five Treasures of Snow.

Dawn Train to Darjeeling

MASK

I am the grandfather of ancestors.

I am before memory.

I am before history.

I am before furrows, fields, fodder, farms. I am before bronze, iron, swords, armies.

I am before anthropology maximized my minutia, minimized my magnitude.

I am before coffee-table books lavished across their pages the breasts of my women but not the children they fed. Parceled me, packaged me, page designed me, focus grouped me, market niched me,

remaindered me, delisted me.

I saw my patterns in weave and clay begaud fashion models and decorator designs, who understood nothing of life made of textures, the fragrance of clay, raffia’s feel on the skin, or how the soul in the loom and the wheel never makes the same piece twice. I am before art dealers and collectors came with certificates of sale I could not read, as thumbprint by thumbprint and X by Y and Y by Z, what remained of my spirit vanished into museums, foyers, executive suites, art galleries, mansions, magazines, luxury shops, none of which would I be permitted to enter.

While face by face, mask by mask, textile by textile, I watched our destiny desiccate in the wind now withering our villages.

In hushed auction rooms

I am described as “African Mask: traces of polychrome, cowrie eyes, ebony nose, zigzag scars, remnants of charcoal dating the piece within the missionary era who demanding impious icons to be thrown into the fire”. Lost are the faces, sons, wives, daughters, cows, pigs, drummers, dancers. farmer, tiller, house-sweeper, young bride, old mother, chattering child, the quavering voices

Upanishad in Asian Pale

in the fireside huddles with a dark storm flashing beyond the sky, the sounds under the moon of child making’s hopes, my feasting, starving, dust-blown, child-filled, fly-laden, charcoal-making, night-dancing village, all suddenly extinct as the auction gavel claps and the soul beneath my African mask, the weather, the wind, the annual rains, the life and forest and desert and death, and all days past bearing all days destined, vanish, forever.

Thus, me.

I emerge now only at night, bits of bead and grass and skin and shell,

under the moon, when what’s left of my village flickers into shadows beyond the fire, voices and drums and chant and dance, bewondering children and squalling babies, smoldering wood and cooking food, dogs racing amid the dust, faces of friends now mythical beings, bodies now spirits, secular now sacred, as all future hope lifts into the safety of the imaginary and all uncertainties vanish into the great whispering roar by which I shall prevail.

ENTHRALLED BY WINDS OF LONELINESS

Drifts of resonance cross separatrix connections to arjunadyhana resting places where we wish we could lie. But to survive must after must to feast of fruition, survive the toil of tranquillity that is the jambu garment of ivory flabellum, kahapana coins of copper, leaf and flower of malati

tamali

navamalika

bimbijalaka

campala

asoka, tilaka, patali

nipa, lembu, kadamba, earthsung gems offered to our eyes amid gamelan accompaniments in old Javanese languages of demeanor, spoken in the elevated rungs of neither fully wrong nor fully right— wrong thing said right is right, right thing said wrong is wrong. So stings the brush of Lady Sei Shonagon of saluang music in minangkabau nightfalls, the black-haired, scarlet-eyed, manqué concubines man-trolling the malls, the patterns of their deceits following the patterns of their garments: scallop shells and they’re fish, strung flowers and they’re gardens, clouds and they’re sky damsels, wave forms and they’re the sea of fecundity.

Androgynous warp achieves local vision

of wefted ikat bleed with which you wear not what you are but what you suppose.

Honshu melmac on linoleum tables, Sunda lavender and Kelamantan pink, Kra drabbles of karst and ochre, red, too, and yellow and brown, all under a bowl of wildfire sky, Chinese ink, Nadu Bharata Natyam, Kufic letters as angulate as their fervor, local villages of crawling crabs, crocodiles and phoenix, makara and naga and flail-tail dragons.

Gods give meaning to us we never find in each other.

Not in our words said which really aren’t meant, nor words meant which really aren’t said, but in a visit to the market stalls to hear the chaffer of the vendors,

Enthralled by Winds of Loneliness

Upanishad in Asian Pale

or down by the docks

listening to the drunken bargemen sing.

WHEN SIKHS DANCE

Sukhdev, Goddess of Happiness, will-of-the-wisps across the threshold on her first Grand Entrance ever. She dances into evening elegance that replaces day’s wrinkles, where earth tones mix with azures and purples.

Cast off now from day’s moorings pale blue khameezes mix with white silk shoulder to wrist there to meet the iron bangles that distinguish Sikh from Punjabi inside the same bit of geography. A sea of brown skin, bays of blue sequins, sandbanks of saffron sleeve.

Oval smiles cascade beneath flowerfalls of black orchid hair.

Colors rich as sweets made of honey and ghee,

noses delicious as sculpted chocolate.

Chandsingh, Lion of the Moon, old enough now to have earned his quavering voice, eyeglasses propped up on his turban, takes the microphone, entreaties, “Pray together, but if you have not the time, have at least dinner together.”

Chandkaur, Princess of the Moon, laments an old Punjabi love song:

I will build a home and make it a heaven for our love. Coming into your arms I am afraid for myself.

When my eyes meet yours, I become a fish out of water, fluttering fluttering.

With you I won’t sing of who I was before, I will sing that I am

the music of a flute that bewitches into butterflies. River of my life, ocean of my love, listen to my prayer: My earth is empty, let your rains come. We are apart, bring us together. Take the light of my eyes and give them your rain, let my dry earth grow flowers in the dry season, let my prayer seduce the gods so I may seduce you and with my love change this earth into a land of flowers which turn my wilted leaves into fresh.

Women conceal their beauties with bodices falling Punjabi-style in sheer monochrome free-falls of benthic blue.

Saffron and matte gold on hither-eyed beauties,

When Sikhs Dance

Upanishad in Asian Pale

flickering faces in the candlelit procession

honoring the sacrament that is rice.

Crimson silk

charcoal cotton

gold brocade

aladdin-toed shoes.

A tot of a girl in a pale yellow khameez, silk skirt of marble and gold

carmel and gold

garnet and gold

cinnabar and gold

moonstone and gold

tourmaline and gold— she, mere sky child now, will one day emerge far-winged Sélène goddess of the moon.

Shawls drape chastely over throats

streaming backward over the shoulders, angels with folded wings.

Flowing spangles and brocades

iridesce into sari-fall osaris of pouring topaz. Dance music like an accordion on fast-forward, so riotous it justifies a garment of pink and tangerine tie-dye-edged with woven silver, worn by a little girl posing as Priceless Miss Precious for daddy’s camera.

Formerly floral ladies who frumped before their time dress in grays, their version of gold with no glitter. Reds enough to envy a sunset emerald greens and sapphire blues black and silver laced with indigo. Vest and shalwar of gold-mine sequins cloaking a khameez’s unfathomable artistry of stripes, as if to say weft is loom’s most joy-giving gift. One woman wore a single solid hue, an impossible-to-conjure merge of rose with crimson, neither too vermilion nor too carmine, not quite carnelian with all of its browns, yet neither quite cerise with its stage-whispers of black, she was red’s finest hour.

When Sikhs Dance

Again Chandkaur sang or did the song sing her?

You gave me the heartache of love yet where are you now?

I walk the emptiness of my desert, every step I take in search of you.

My night goes by with unclosed lids; my days are many hours of unhappy song.

Oh love, come back, come back to me.

Oh love, I will live in your hut I will come into your arms and yield my emptiness.

I will turn my finger into a pen, write these words onto your heart. Since you came into my life

I’d rather be in your fate than in the smiles of the gods. Please, Oh my lover, my god, come back to me come back. The evening’s-end dance melted into a riot of paints no longer edged by shape but by the half-awake/half-asleep point when dreamtime becomes real and realtime becomes dream, skein themselves into silk of woven touch so blended with being that life, sex, self, love,

Upanishad in Asian Pale

the fire of love and chill of fate, with its chill, too, of time and departure become one — no, no, not one, not a thousand and one nor ten thousand and one a hundred thousand and one. Just . . . One. It was the grandest dance an eye ever laid to.

JETSAM ON THE UBIQUITY TRAIL

We no want you no-clothes lipstick type women come our village, lah!

We village, you big-city lepak layabout women, not village like us, lah!

Our lives good, men work, wahhhh, hard they work, women cook, sweep, children happy, waghhhh.

We no want daughters see make-up type magzines you bring. We this land, not you, heinh!

You lipstick women say you new-time we old-time, Aneeeyyy!

We no want new-time, Aneeeyyy.

We no backtalk men like you,

Upanishad in Asian Pale

Aneeeyyy.

No want daughters go city school, never come back.

Aneeeyyy!

Want village boys marry village girls, no marry city girls.

They do, lah, what then?

Village go ssst-ssst, dry up like chapati too hot.

You Aneeeyyy our sila way of things, lah!

Timepast say all things given we must do, we not do, bad happen. Then what?

Rice farmer use stone try stop leak in bisokotuwa water sluice-gate, water go over bemma paddy top, whole paddy waghhhh wash to sea.

Better lose little water than whole paddy.

Women got three masks.

First woman wear mask, no see other mask.

Second woman wear mask, evileye other mask.

Third woman got man, man bring food, make kids, girls do women-work, boys do man-work.

Build house, keep clean, cook, eat, have babies, go temple, this-type woman no need mask.

You come, teach paper-book write. Timeoutofmind we sand-book write.

Finger draw in sand: house picture fix house cart picture fix cart temple picture build temple. Longtime we know right mix water, sand, soil, straw for when vessa rain-time come.

You know this?

No.

Jetsam on the Ubiquity Trail

Upanishad in Asian Pale

You care this?

No.

You ask us?

No.

You come lepak layabout talk-telling us do your way?

Yes.

Waghhhh!

You second mask-type woman.

Waghhhh!

SECRET HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS

Author note: I include these in this collection of my own work to draw attention to the rich trove of song poetry in the little explored cultural arena between Samarkand and Dunhuang, rimming both sides of the Taklamakan Desert. From the second century BCE to 1453, half a dozen distinct cultures emerged and vanished into the vast sandy waste traversed by several major trade routes commonly called the Silk Route. Who today pays much attention to the literary legacy of the Bactrians, Khotanese, Sogdians, Ghandarans, Gilgit? Here are two tales whose ancestry can be traced back to the Indo-European diffusion that manifested itself in India first as the Vedic and then the Hindu cultures. Astute readers will spot the origin of the Khori Tumed song-poem as a modification of Krishna courting Radha.

KHORI TUMED

From the 1908 Secret History of the Mongols written in the mongyul kele script, also known as Khalkha. It is one of the comeliest scripts in Ural-Altaica, written vertically down the page.

One day Khori Tumed saw nine swans flying toward a nearby lake.

When the swans removed their feathered garments to bathe, Khori beheld that they were beautiful women. Thinking they were alone the women splashed and played. While they were enjoying their play, Khori stole one of the feathered garments. When the women left the water one was dismayed that she could not find her feathers and therefore could not return to her swan.

Khori Tumed stepped from behind a tree and insisted that she be his wife. She had no choice but to consent. They eventually produced eleven sons. One day she asked Khori Tumed to give her back her feathered garment so she could again be a swan.

At first he refused, fearing she would immediately fly away. But after repeated entreaties he finally relented if she would assure him she would not fly away.

Secret History of the Mongols

She promised, but when she put on her feathers she returned to her swan self hidden all these years, flew out the window and away.

Hearing his pleas for her to return, she circled their home eleven times, giving each of their sons a swan name as she did. Then she flew home to Swan Lake and never returned.

ALAN ΓOA

Alan Γoa is a mythical figure from the Secret History of the Mongols, who lived eleven generations after the primal ancestors Grey Wolf and White Doe, and ten generations before Chinggis Khan. The character “Γ” is pronounced as if uttering “Q” or “Kh” while simultaneously clearing one’s throat.

During the lifetime of Dobun Mergen

his wife Alan Γoa had two sons, Begünütei and Belgünütei.

After he died Alan Γoa did mot marry again. In time, she bore three more sons,

Bukha Khatagi, Bukhatu-Salji, and Bodonchar Munkhag. This naturally raised suspicions of the worst kind. Her two oldest sons accused the three younger ones of being fathered by an Uriankhai servant. The younger ones felt slighted by this, and soon enough there was talk of arms being used. Hearing of these plots, Alan Γoa summoned her five sons for a meal. She gave them each one arrow and told them to break it. They did so easily. Then she made a bundle of five arrows and told them to break it. None could do so.

Alan Γoa then revealed that her three younger sons derived from a glittering visitor who came through the roof of her yurt each night by crawling on the beams of the moon, and left each morning by crawling on the beams of the sun.

Secret History of the Mongols

She told her elder sons that the three younger ones were children of heaven and it was wrong to compare them with ordinary people. She advised her sons that if each tried to go his own way, they would be broken like the five single arrows. But if they remained together like the bundle of five arrows, nothing could harm them.

They went on to father the five clans of the Mongols.

IN THE PRESENCE OF THINGS GREATER

In the first year in the time of Chih-ho the fifth moon on the day of Chi-ch’ou a Guest Star appeared southeast of Tien-Kuan. It could be seen in the day like Venus with rays pointing in the twenty-three directions and remained for twenty-three days. On the day of Hsin-wei in the third month of the year of Chia-yu the Guest Star was no longer to be seen; this was interpreted as an omen that the harmattan wind had blown.

If you had witnessed that Guest in your year of one thousand fifty-four, clouds reflecting the tourmaline sea seeming like white rain in the snow,

would you have realized you had seen the feathers of Grandfather Fire and thereafter needed no more?

So why think you of abstruse postscripts that condense moment into theory immensity into filaments chaos of color into clouds which in time become points which in time become the stun of extinction which becomes chaos which becomes color which becomes immensity which becomes filaments which become the axles of kalpa turning and the laws of fences facing. That night in the Year of the Guest the wind siffling about your robes, the bamboo chrysantheming your side, you would have needed no words to know what the star advised: Seek always the water stilled not the hour on the waves.

GODS SUBSIST ON ROADS OF KILL

This piece originated in my own experience of hearing muffled screams and crying children from a certain building I frequently passed in Mumbai. It took several weeks of inquiry to learn that the building was a brothel for pedophiles. Four times I dined in a restaurant whose windows afforded a view of who entered that building. I saw the men. I heard the girls. Then I learned the myths related below. In poverty-riddled low-caste villages, the perennial problem of what to do with excess daughters who cannot be dowered is solved by selling the girls to itinerant procurers who deceive parents with the tale that their daughters will become maids in good families. I learned that the price for a six-year-old was three sacks of rice. Older girls between eight and eleven were worth only two sacks. The words below are an amalgam of my own observations and many vignettes related to me by courageous women who put themselves in harm’s way fighting the pedophile brothels in Mumbai and Chennai. The flirty tales of incest among the Hindu gods described in the Rg Ved (Rig Veda) have devastating consequences when idyllic myths descend to the level of those who patronize brothels. The incest myths are similarly interpreted by fathers and brothers whose daughters/sisters are accorded no rights of their own. It may seem heartless to seek poetry in the gruesome life of a ten-year-old girl sold into one of Asia’s legions of child brothels, but one duty of poetry is to tell the truth. The references to the Bombay film world reflect the economics of crime lords from the Gulf states and India laundering their criminal profits from drugs, brothels, and extortion by investing in Bollywood’s sweetly romantic songand-dance films. The irony could not be more cruel.

Upanishad in Asian Pale

It’s in the Rg Ved their wandering desires skulk over my skin Agni was the lover of his sister the next one how silent he is but he’s scented the rose

I am one of the unfortunate ones, the girls a mother knows she can never dower, in a world where an undowerable daughter fetches a week’s worth of rice from the men who tour the countryside looking for easy profits.

It’s in the Rg Ved I must give the rose and give again after Pushan was the lover of his sister till I am as a pomegranate rent thighs stained its color

Girls not sold into the brothels can face the fate of indentured service to an elderly “uncle” with a secret room in his innermost heart where he dreams of sex with his daughter, but not being able to hint the slightest word of his dreams given his standing in the community, sublimates them into raping his “maid.”

It’s in the Rg Ved his shallow quick breaths

Gods Subsist on Roads of Kill

his smell of spoiling sea

It’s in the Rg Ved the sea I loved till I smelled it seeping from me

Hush and be still daughter!

I am your father and this is my duty.

It’s in the Rg Ved the piercing gush the cut of his scissors

The Ashvins married their sisters Surya and Savitri the river of his groans drowns my hair

I force out of my mind their unzipping sounds the street below hearing from the windows and doing nothing and what would begin running running along the black roads of fright pretending I was asleep the dark dream night when his moaning is my morning make sure my eyelids do not flutter circles of faces watching with clouds of eyes

It’s in the Rg Ved suffocated by saffron thrown over my face

They made the brothers the Ashvins the suffocating fright under bodies like stone

the madness of their thinking that the more they force me please please murder me, I want it so the more I will give give me a knife to slash my throat and never, never pull my hips away choke me choke me till I struggle no more force my fingers to not tremble scream and scream and hear only the next one unzipping hour after hour after hour tearing my insides till they are as red as my thighs

It’s in the Rg Ved in and in and in the sanguine beak

Savitar and Usha were brother and sister cruel the sound that never ends the dog that snarls between my legs

see the married man daughtering me in his afternoons somebody then somebody then somebody the next sleep when I can and not know how many have me the gods are strangers dressed in black wish, too, my heart would reach the snapping point of my will

Gods Subsist on Roads of Kill

I am a dead body that knows not what an hour is the men of religion who beat me where they just raped me till I finally cry out despite the punishment it brings the man of politics who continues to slap after he is done see me in the mirror of your gold-colored car not even an adolescent, my breasts not yet begun to swell from my bitten nipples come pretty bosoms in your films

Agni was the son of his father and his sister all the gods, all of them, spoilage on my thighs

It’s in the Rg Ved while the lies of their sex-bribing kisses kiss instead dread

eyes of hate behind the cowled holyman hood seek me in the scrolling credits of sweetly romantic films my thoughts when I first learned this was to be fighting the other girls for the room’s only blanket whatever my life remained there I am, unwritten in the gossip columns of screen stars the network of criminals who launder silver-screen dreams

Prajapati was the incarnation of Vishnu and his daughter He pretends he’s having a god but he knows it’s only me

It’s in the Rg Ved the god of his dreams is the poison in my throat

Hush and be still sister, I am your brother shut my eyes, shut them and father has said me pray for the sleep to come this is my due

This is life ten times a night into my eyes their sperm spray in which I slowly drown little if any sleep by day on the creaking charpoi cot’s strings the tinted tunnel of darkness that paints their vanity into my cries unroped to be taken to the well suffocating under unbathed bodies and decaying teeth have my body washed of the hours just passed raped in rope before my little buds could begin to grow knowing I would die one rape at time but not knowing the number or when it would come

Hush and be still, daughter, this is my duty

It’s in the Rg Ved Hush and say nothing, sister, this is my due

Rape after rape then wait for the next all this from cloud-maid ghandarvas singing of celestial love

Rape

Gods Subsist on Roads of Kill

oh men, men, when will you see

Rape

the dazzling virgins of yesteryear gods

Rape

now make fantasies and brothels each the other

Rape

as a father’s psychic ancestry mutilates with tradition

Rape

until my footprints fade into a bored husband’s first visit to

Rape

The inshredding heat

eyes like teeth and teeth like prows

my net too small and the fish too barbed the gills become eel and the eel a squid tentacles of breath and tongues of kisses wrapping over and into and out of me thrusts of stinging needles and snipsnip scissors till I am on fire inside

I remember the smells the spoiling flowers behind the temple the musk of the goats and urine of the sows the gift-milk for the gods now souring behind the lotuses the sticky purple of the banana flower tied so it will drip sweet juice because it cannot open the plumeria’s drunken poison

the helioconia’s smell like my drunken father’s this one breathes like my father the next moves like my father my father, my father they all look like my father he was the first now he’s all the rest.

Daughter this is my duty

It’s in the Rg Ved

Gods Subsist on Roads of Kill

Now I know why my mother when my father demanded of her choked and shriveled and held back her breath till as soon as he was done left the door beads clicking in the night, why at the well she splashed herself splashed and splashed again, again, again and she cursed which she never othertimes did I understand now why she spat on the earth so often so much.