Two Poems

On rain

This is a poem about rain,
not you,
so you will forgive me
if I only refer to you in the oblique,
fleetingly,
between the L-shaped sounds
of water,
shadowy places,
and a cerise sky.
Sometimes,
when the night is deep
you are out on the streets
and I'm waiting for sleep,
I send out rain
to follow you,
lopsidedly, as if a kind
ghost, as if through an
hourglass
you were seeing
sand at a slant.
So if I open the window a little,
swaying against glass,
test the air
for a possibility of rain,
perhaps you will forget
how, sometimes,
rain is complicated,
rain can break you if it wants.
Who knew, one night
rain under streetlamps
would aspire to the condition
of glow-worms?
This rain is a letter,
how it pulses through,
angling words
out of the slow scent of raw earth,
sudden lights.
But this poem is rain,
on you.

 

On the way to Udhagamandalam

Slow land
divides
into squares below you.
Raucous:

trees
gesturing
toward a temple's
protracted lap.
Around the hill's weight, strangers
yet intimate,
ranging the ground, clawing
at their
own roots.
From this end
they are close-cropped,
poisonous.
You cannot sate their hunger
with mere chlorophyll-
sieved
mineral and salt.
They crave more:
forces
intangible as dark mirrors of themselves.
At noon
they eat their shadows.