Diwali

I sit by the window on a blue train from Mysore to Bangalore,

my forehead resting against the cold, metal bar that crosses all

the windows down the line of the train, watching the landscape

roll by like the frames of a film. It is night, but only a few seconds pass

between fireworks that illuminate palm trees, rice paddies, and

mounds of sugarcane stalks. With each strobe, a new scene:

women holding up their technicolored saris as they lead Nandi-bulls

through paddy spotted with spikes of rice plants. A huddle of

big-bellied, dhoti-clad men smoking bidis on their stationary motorcycles,

waiting for the train to pass. A painted elephant sauntering along

the dirt path parallel to the tracks, followed by men carrying lanterns.

The train pauses and I hear the constant whoosh-crack of fireworks,

the blaring, sharp Bollywood music crackling from cell phones,

the off-key singing of a blind woman who roams from car to car.

A few men leap off the train and rush to a mound of harvested sugarcane.

They yank out a few stalks and hurry back as the train begins to

creak forward. One man hacks them into foot-long pieces and hands

them to passengers who chew on the sweet meat of the cane.

Soon, the fields are filled in by low, palm-roofed houses and temples

where Carnatic singers and tablas and clanging bells call Hindus to celebrate

the triumph of Rama. Villages turn into the city: buildings stacked on buildings,

obscured by a yellow haze burning with constant explosions in the streets,

off the rooftops. The people are shadows with occasional faces when

the smoke cracks. Barefoot children, sparklers in hand, glow orange and

even from this far I see their white teeth and the whites of their eyes bright

against their smog-smudged faces. As the train reaches the station, 

the celebration is obscured. My white, ghostly reflection is superimposed against

the window: braided hair, bindi between my eyes, gold earrings and a hoop

in my nose, scarf draped around my neck and falling down my back.

The reflections of passengers behind me busy themselves with their luggage.

The train stops. I allow myself to be swept into the darkness, assured by

the hum of anticipation as the throng moves as one towards the light outside.

We burst out doors and separate in slow arcs, dissolving into the charged night.

Mysore Palace lit up for Diwali

Stillness

i. West Virginia

Only when you look up into the sky in West Virginia

can you perceive the turning, the suspension,

what it is to be inundated and overwhelmed.

            You realize a grand scheme;

            you realize you’re not really a part of it.

Cool black sky, turning down the side of the earth

no matter the interruptions in its vulnerable stillness:

the crack of a gun shot, a car dragging

its weight down 259, the shriek of a cow,

her black baby invisible to her in the thick night.

It rearranges itself in globules, in collections of space

that assemble into a spinning whole, a dome that

could at anytime, in some massive, heaving sigh,

collapse inward on you, head tilted back in this empty field.

As soon as you close your eyes

            with intention,

there is a sinking inward and

            downward;

an eclipse of your own outline.

Outward noises are dull

and your ears feel pressured

as if you are diving into deep water

that darkens until there is no

concrete signifier of time or location.

You become unsure if the unbounded

blackness stretching always away from you

is the depth of water or the

breadth of night sky lulling you

toward the assurance of spatial

            envelopment.

ii. Wyoming

There is still snow on the Big Horn Mountains in June,

snow up to your thigh, higher in some places,

swallowing you whole if you misstep.

In the thin air, miles in the sky, each breath you inhale

feels like a surprise, a cold explosion in the throat

that never arrives at your lungs.

The crunching ice, snow, crumbling rock, and dead grass

create a rhythm with each step; any interruption and you

will tumble right off the mountain

into the spikes of evergreens that congregate in the valley.

Blinding blue at the top, and freezing; gravity directed upward,

            the mountain pushing you from underneath.

A basin full of scrub and snakes spreads out behind the mountain’s

turned back, ignored by the clouds that gather at its peak.

            A sinewy river cuts across; a curved highway sits perpendicular.

Nothing moves but drifting clouds and your own whirring body.

It is as if your thoughts are wrapped in watery tulle

that ebbs and expands. The mind visions are shrouded,

each one beyond a layer, a net, that makes it unattainable:

but you do not mind as a shadow closes over each one in turn:

you are an observer: you are the subject:

you weave from one thought to the other as if they were tiny,

remote islands, given only a moment of consideration

before you are pulled back in between them:

light glinting off a river: cucumber tendrils pulling themselves

up a fence: a field of wheat grown above your head,

so that all you can see is the expanse of sky and thin stalks

enveloping you: a portrait of a placid girl in a white hallway:

you realize, as you fade from it, it is not a portrait, but a mirror.

iii. India

Ashen moon nearly full, Shiva’s contented face shrouded by

lavender, slate: its restrained glow illuminates cloud lace.

So far away from this rooftop, and so far away from the

commotion below: Indian families on motorcycles,

men in slapping sandals herding their goats to the distant pond;

women beating their saris dry on clothes lines as babies stare.

White, vaporous water birds with curved necks dive incessantly

away from this scene, toward black trees beneath the silver orb.

Behind you, opposite the moon, the sun sets, orange pink hues

clinging to cumuli, casting the bustle below in gold.

Look up at the dusky meeting of day and night; balance

on cosmic schism, caught amongst the familiar and the ineffable.

Stare into the radiance: the delicate thread of orbital arc;

the filament between consciousness and dreams.

Before you can attach yourself to anything or any place,

you are gently removed, drifting beyond, in between,

not in space, precisely, nor air or nothingness or ether;

idling in the unnamable, meandering in a vessel with no anchor,

no ear for the ticking away of time, no eye for land until it is simply

there. You turn inward and inward until you coalesce with this

in between and come out of the dream, this centermost state, reshaped.