Do you
only
go to new
places
is it true
did the
planet
just get
born

I found a lengthy word with a non-Russian ending,
unwittingly, inside a children’s storybook,
and turned away from it with a strange kind of shudder.

You can only have a lot of power,
never enough:
the strength to lift

Flinging sticks and calling
to an amphibian black dog,
he clings, buoylike, though probably

I bought a camera, though there were
many reasons not to.
In spite of the reasons not to

Why do it? shrilled the bird,
the as-yet-unnamed, a
candidate for new coinage,
namely widewit,

You must change your life, Mademoiselle
from Armentières, while the days are in your favor.
You have other battles,

Swallowed by blood-red vinyl of the hotel lounge,
I drain the last of a grasshopper—my first cocktail,
ever. You loosen your tie. Dad, glare at headlines

My index finger nestles in your hand.
You run a penknife’s blade beneath the nail.
Discomfort is a thing we understand.

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