At the Lakshmi Temple grounds at Rajgir

At the Springs of Temple Lakshmi

At the Lakshmi Temple grounds at Rajgir the hot springs cure all. We wash hands

in the generous springs. Splash liberally on the face and over the head.

Clothes, no matter. Everyone is wet in all manner of dress. Say your name. 

Say your family members’ names. One by one they are cleansed in your prayers. 

Drink shiny metal cups full. Capture it loose and heavy from the stone dragon's

outpouring mouth. Sit with the water as it confirms your shape on worn stone steps.

Listen to children gurgling. See their parents washing their iniquities in pools 

of belief as their parents and their parents and their parents, and so on.

Hear the boatload of middle schoolers on a field trip to Lakshmi's holy springs. 

Watch them bob with giggles and glee, forgetting the anxieties of twelve.

Listen to the girls sing along to the happy Hindi music as they splash. See their 

school uniforms transform from marine blue to the dark deep shelf of the ocean.

Touch the warm waters of Lakshmi Temple to consider how they play with humanity.  

Is it their own beauty, or do they conjure the sublime in you?

Your physical body: How its muscles languish; how the spine bends achingly 

forward in years; how the limbs follow you around carrying tired heaps of skin.

Yet in these waters the body has become gorgeous. It is one with the Hindu prayers. 

One with a clean past. One with the canticles and rhythms of water.

One with the Brahmin priest who is blessing you for your offering, a white flower 

you have laid at the foot of a stone goddess Lakshmi, adorned in purple and gold.

Gold, reflected in your eyes, wide with infinity. Purple like the dripping cliffs, 

curtains of heaven surrounding the pools.

A skinny man balances all that is sugar atop his head on a wide, metal tray, notices

your eyes and dips precariously to showcase all that is available for you.

Your mouth lingers with his sesame, milk, coconut and caramel, and as you drip 

in the cool shade of a bodhi tree, beaded water nestled in the hairs of your arm loosens.

Loosens, ushering a sweet river of sugar juice that disappears in drips off the elbow, 

a gift for grateful ants at the Temple of Lakshmi.

Forgetting where you are could be anywhere or nowhere

It’s All There Is, In India

Sometimes in India

Forgetting where you are

Could be anywhere

Or nowhere, in Kushinigar

From the bus window:

Slow man on a pink, beat bike

A baby rides a lean woman’s hip

Agile dogs mount in a trash ditch

With plastic signs of commerce                  

Everywhere without commerce      

Anywhere on planet earth

After 5 weeks, you are alert

To the location of your bag

In the universe, your gaze,

Passport. Is anyone lurking

The station besides that confident rat?

Where are your feet? How crazy is he?

Are you attracting attention?

Does your crossed leg show too much sole?

How is your odor from the monsoon sweat?

Are you hungry? Did you take a malaria pill?

Alone makes one obsessed with self

Then it occurs to you:  You

Are an insect with giant oval eyes

Alert in the flickering light

Preening yourself, exposed

Alert for predators

Aware of the mopping man

Transforming tiles in swirls

With a glee that comes from

Illusion, or pills, or conviction

That the moment of now

Is all there is

Climate change is melting people free from icy tombs

From a Time Before Climate Change

Towering slabs lose their grip

Remains are melting from the ice

Who starved while singing from their pain

Below blackened cliffs that drip

Of eons, echoing to hush

Deep draws of breath and time

Open tombs around the world

Who ran away with mouth wide open

From war or clutching amulets

Still rubbed clean

Long whimpering thaws

Drain salt of tears to sea

Who was a thief and bled out

Before helicopters

Or search parties

We will date them

Scan pollen samples

Who was hunting ‘til lost in fog

Burry them in boxes

Or museums

Sometimes they curl

Or straighten as they thaw

Who slipped or was chased

Sometimes turn first to red

Then hues of stone

Cannot inquire as to decisions

Study contents of their stomachs

Who lost a lover, well aware into the cold

From a time before engines

Or climate change

The Ghats of Varanasi

The Ghats of Varanasi

The ghats come clean when drops of rain

Flood slurry scum from ancient slabs

Of stone hauled thick from Maharajan cliffs

Into a river flowing brown, opaque and swift

Wide rows of toothy stone, the ghats, in packs

Down from the spitting slums where kids

Wake spritely and squat early in the shade

Then climb into their bare snake suits

These ghats live well on refuse and on ash

As women pound the clothes of day to pulp

In the wash to mangroves where the licks

Of tigers curl in sleep at Bengal Bay

Singing softly in the dusk, the ghats

Ignore the clocks and what is at their backs

Intent with solemn sticks that float with bones

In time with eons and lit candles on their lips

These ghats take all children thin and wet

Whose mothers peer through iron bars to see

Their searing shimmers wiggle as they rise

Or dive in magic arches and bold splash

The gritty ghats lure cashless, squinting bulls

With monkey gods, blue women and the strays

Lap puddles and chew mango seeds til gone

Leaving holy places with their dry thin stools

Brahmin bells proclaim what we have missed

Truth be told, you’ll find it in a coconut

Its cool white milk and wet shredded meat

Is hulled and hairy and smells of burning flesh

On el Dia de Los Muertos

Lying On Her Grave

Incense poked into her soil

We wonder how she died

On November 11, 1878

Woman with lichened, unreadable name

Decayed below her tombstone

A mother oak--dark and stretched

Wide against the glowing white

Of sky

We drink Palomas with Mezcal

Before dodging traffic to a gallery

Watch an artist demolish his perfect

Vessels into sunken forms

The way he remembers bodies

Slumped in the street

Returning to earth

In Iraq

As the candle burns low

Our legs wrap like roots

Noticing gothic letters, flickering

Her name becoming clear

She is John Sutton, a man

We wonder if John has finally

Come out on Dia de los Muertos

With the light

When the gallery lights dim

We eat tacos across the street

For the Day of the Dead

While the Addams Family flickers

Behind the bar, yet

My eyes rivet on spirits

Moving in and out of apertures

Of her dress

No one is watching

On the Dia de los Muertos

The lovers sprawled amongst

Bones.  No one is honoring

Life like those who flicker

In their skeletal moments

Freeing themselves, exorcising

The dead

You do the DNA test and find this

After the Flight

You do the DNA test

Bring the sealed results to a funeral weekend

Everyone gorges on Chinese food

In the living room you reach into the envelope

There is laughing about our thousand year lineage

About how much this or that, as if we know

Most everything we’d know

Except the 10.5% Jewish

Looking at each other

That one word

Stands up on the page

Like a boney stereotype

The sound of Ashkenazi

Someone Googles it

Most of all, laughter

2-4 generations back

10.5% of our blood. 10.5% of the giggling

My Jewish friends get a text

A little allure about Jews

African Americans and Jews

And now some of them is you           

When Chinese food was empty trays and egg drop soup

During landing, considering

The wheels touching down

Spinning hot and burnt

Amongst cornfields, dead and tall

Hearing their wheezing breaths

You realize

This is 10.5% targeted. 10.5% spit

10.5% grief and ash and bones

From a pit

This is kinfolk in a forest, hunched

Cousins, mocked, raped or blamed

An uncle or an aunt, 100%

Ducked into their own

Face full of tears

Searching

Games of the World Series

An intrusive thought: I am not a Cubs fan; just want to route for the loser

I am a loser, searching the screen, eyeing a woman in a jeans skirt in a bar

So sexy, TV. Elements of guilt. Facebook. Fly out to center.

Facebook, addicted already after six weeks. Maybe just compulsion

Don’t want to get up to brush my teeth. I can stop any time I want

The reverse of yoga. On my side, the Indians’ logo looks like the middle finger

Look really hard. Wait for a close-up. This is the opposite of church:

Smiley commentators, Simpsons commercial, Fox Sports, Camry, Cancer

Campaign ad. Cubs win. Facebook. Time for bed, face tomorrow

Maybe another night on the couch it’s warm enough flick the light

TV fucked me again without my consent. Nonetheless we cuddle

Our feet tickled by the waves mixing with glowing sands

Not long ago, when the wind and sea crashed together at my feat

I would have told you--I told myself--there was no way to be, except unfettered

By force of skull, the way nails cannot budge from timeworn boards

When you’ve sniffed the sweat of children tying bedazzling carpets

Been to Hemingway’s bar, or heard cracks choir up from a frozen lake

Sailed the bays of far, pumping the iron of globe, but feel numb

It’s the medication. The testosterone levels. It’s relationships. Stress        

Facebook. Midlife. The imprints of bygones, an irreducible congestion

Search, I tell myself, real hard. For Solomon’s wisdom, through his ruins

Our brain ranks last in thought, nonetheless talks a lot

The Neurons of the Octopus are Vested in its Tentacles

The octopus is in its groove

Conscientious thug in a realm

Its neurons mostly sway in arms

Its brain is finer than the slots

Apparently the waters warming

Will do just fine, the creature,

Swiftly changing to demands,

Is no polar bear for sympathy

Our brain is in the tongue

It’s tied into a knot

Forests being felled in swaths

Thank god we’re half way in

Our brain is in the bog

Its fumes tally the decay

You see the compass arrow spin

We’re all heading South

Each breath falls off the shelf

Rum is running in the ears

Our brain ranks last in thought

Nonetheless talks a lot

Our brains are in our cocks

Acquiescing to its rot

The mind is tucked in fast asleep

Thoughts without being thunk

Our brain is leaking common junk

The info poisonous to touch

Were we an octopus to acclimate

We might just call the future lunch

Truth is a bowl of flaming oil and a dog.

Bowl of Flaming Oil

A Chinese sage once said, “Truth is ‘neither this nor that.

It is a bowl of flaming oil and a dog:  Entranced, vexed, immobilized by 
it

        This is how truth burns”

Her bones are remodeled, she creates like a god

Eats in the convent with clowns and a snake. Sleeps in jail with silk sheets in the
nude

        Bathes in a river of crocodile teeth

She vanishes with the failing light

Sheds her skin in a cave on the hill, uttering questions for the
sure

        Scratching in darkness in the dirt

Then sunrise squints into her yawning eyes

A quiver, then a feeling: It is happening! Like a padlocked piano lurching into the
day

        To cast light on its keys

When It Finally Takes Flight Leaving You Free and Sad

When Marriage Finally Takes Flight Leaving You Free and Sad

I.

When marriage finally takes flight

(and I mean ends)

You may be left with a freedom

From its triangles of elephantine memory

Free from a quarter century of cataloged errors

Free of her bickering clutter

Of those dishes and dishes

And stacks of sorry parenting

Free of her crystaline stare and conversation-less daze

Weekends of issues about issues

Free of nights sans joi d’vive et bon vivant

Or any French terms whatsoever

Free of marriage falling asleep on me

Free of her dirty pots

Thank god almighty

I am free [at last]

from her tasteless soups

II.

Free, yet

When your marriage finally takes flight

(and I mean ends)

You may experience a sadness lasting more than five hours

You may burrow deeply under the covers

Through jungles of kismet
Sad as oranges rotting

Sad for the boys

Dreaming arguments

Slapping on cliffs

At the roaring seas

Low as an albatross

Warping the waves

Leaving a continent

                                                             

Sad like a marriage

That should have not

Left the continent

Twenty-three years ago

(and I mean taken flight)

To flutter and skim the whitecaps

Eyes stinging shut

Far from shore

Leaving a continent

(and I mean leaving a marriage)

Soaring free as swells lift

Flapping as they drop