I want only to be a worn-down stone
on the ruins of time,

I’ll go plant the tree of my grief
in the wetlands
of silence close to her grave

I’ll live in lantana
shrubs

Yesterday I kicked a tree
a walnut fell in a grave
nobody got hurt

it’s June
the February
of summer

after Valmiki’s Ramayana (Aranya Kanda, Sarga 46)

Dressed simply but not
without elegance, holding ritual
staff and parasol

Radiating gloom, like an asteroid with designs on a star
like night’s curved shadow that swims across the Earth
like the darkness of our Sun in its deepest explosions
like the planet Budhan about to take hold of Rohini
like Saturn advancing on Chitra
like the forests and cities and far ridges of infinity
each planetary body with its moons each moon that governs

Five o’clock on a crisp, star-clear winter evening,
sun just sunk beneath the oyster-blue Pacific Ocean,
a panoramic swath of reflective foil rippling incessantly
as if ants were crawling everywhere across it.

Photographs of photographs and Polaroids
of stacks of books on fragments
and photographs and pamphlets
on letters sent and imminent
collisions. What the body does not know
it wants. And the mind.

I would like this poem
to be a machine.
Concise, metallic,
a counting apparatus.
A means to keep each moment
contained and fixed, akin
to a series of Polaroids,
photographed and fixed
to cardboard or some other
paper-panel backing.

Here we are at last, meeting face-to-face like two heroes of opposing armies, looking each other in the eye, poised to shake hands. Do you trust me? Do I trust you? No, trust died last century, along with truth, so we’ll have to think of something else to shake on.

"Nobody knows the system better than me."

We talk most days, but today he sounds far worse
than he’s sounded since they died.
I think he should call our old shrink. I say:
"Call me back after you call the shrink."
He hangs up, waits ten minutes, calls back.
"I did it," he lies, "but her service
says she’s away. What do I do?"

i.
Now these were the embarkations they made to the holy places of egypt sinai
palestine and syria in the years of furies 1916–17 unto the last 1918. Godspeed under the schoolyard’s cherry tree scrawled his anabasis marred by dust and the red smell of the sea.

ii.
Disembarked for alexandria shuck camp and enchained at moascar and proceeded to el
ferdan where it dechained and proceeded to reduit camp where it encamped and took over duties and post defenses in the sun.

iii.
And was shuck off the strength accordingly. england. Heavy-clouded. That was the month of
the death of the late Field Marshal Right Honourable H. H. Earl Kitchener of Khartoum K.G.  G.C.B.  O.M.  G.C.S.I.  G.C.M.G.  G.C.I.E. Colonel Commandant Royal Engineers Colonel Irish Guards Secretary of State for war that for a period of one week officers of the army shall wear mourning with their uniforms on this melancholy occasion. The boy wiped cherry on his lionized shirt in bad faith.