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.