DAWN TRAIN TO DARJEELING

Day’s dusky hazes bloom tree colors into 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 square holes 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 by everywhichway wind, feet dusted the sandy tan of 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, coffee, tea, manioc, banana.

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

A woman kneels to light her cooking 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 life once lived is that the stones among the bamboo now hide cobras.

Wispy leafless thistles, fences of crisscrossed sticks, a lurching road navigates the 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 the 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 goading 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, 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.