|
Their Names and Ears Had Been Erased
Yes, the sacred sash of eels keeps bleeding its mark across my forehead.
I am shunned as if I’d never been a fish.
There was the delicate feast, the bush fires near Mombasa ineffably cool.
There was the soon-to-be-plunged, the horizon of an amazing locust.
Give me an injection of morphine and say you’re sorry for avoiding the task of mending a shirt.
Say you’re sorry for not recognizing my mouth or the ear cleaners, on a Bombay street,
going deep.
When they brought the paper, no one knew why their names and ears had been erased.
Mumbai was sometimes Bombay. Banaras sometimes Varanasi.
One of us swore it had to do with a previous birth.
We couldn’t remember whether we’d been able to afford a coin to close the eye.
Everyone was misunderstood by everyone else, which meant we were not fish at all.
The electric tongue of some marvelous eel offered to swallow me chakra by chakra and
mark me toward dissolve.
What was I doing when I’d devoted that one entire life to tending an anonymous tree?
I’d become a gardener, obsessed with Backflower and Ash, and would not allow a single rib cut or branch to be burned or broken. |
