De-extinction Postcard

I have spent so many nights
worrying about losing bones, teeth,
hair, recovering a ring of tanzanite. As a child
I wanted to be a dinosaur, roaming the floodplains –
duck-billed, stout. Having survived, I would like to pull
carcasses out of sinkholes and set them to work, Run,
Spinosaurus, run! The problem with resurrections is there is still
all this life – unexplained bulbs in the flower beds, cabbage heads,
mud, mosquitoes foraging at dusk to smother all our celestial
striving. I’d miss bananas. I’d miss melancholy. Lazarus limped
home, but we know nothing of what happened in the soundless
dark. Only the rise, only the returning. I’m trying to hold
this late morning, these parched yellow flowers,
even the two dogs at my feet, synching heartbeats, who do not once consider the tragedy
of a day continuing without them.
To whomsoever this should reach:
I write from a town that no longer exists,
in a language whose final words have been carved
into a trunk of pylon. Send no rescue missions
for us. If you have known love, understand:
The view to infinity is marred by hedgerow,
a line of bedclothes drying. The going,
when it goes, is forever gone.

Living Through the Apocalypse

They will have us believe
we are waking to a garden
which is a parable  a tea party
where some of us get cake and others
get sticks  that the man jumping
on the corpse of another man
is doing so to save his life
that the red hole in the dead man’s chest
is a rare kind of flower
which blooms only when the body
turns to dust   Some days
we can believe that the seas
sneaking up on us will take us
over the edge   Some days
the scrub stretches out like a warm
pool where cameras watch
from behind lily pads   Remember
there was a time when the leap
was joyful when mountains had wings
before they were clipped
There was only the heart
and the beating of it
Everything else was a kind of slumber

A Stupa for the 49th Year of Life

When you
come upon it
in the 49th year
of life, do not be
alarmed if it does not sit
atop a hill with a ceremonial
gate, warning you not to waver
off the path, or if it has not risen from
the ground like a giant honeybun, ancestor
of the spaceship. Expect a simple begging bowl
buried at the crossroads, enough to hold these reliquaries:
ointment jar, isolated sea town, fibrilla of mother’s breast,
mucosa of father’s stomach, shard of cousin’s jaw. As though
the war had always been between life and lifelessness, when really
it’s about who can take the dinghy out into the void and stay there,
bob-bobbing the longest. How the old disciples waded through an
ocean of sorrows to show the Buddha without showing: riderless horse,
empty throne. Aniconic path to nirvana. Perhaps you’ll want to circumambulate?
Or has all the whirling got you begging to be let off the ride? Enough with chanting
the world has no beginning, because mostly now it’s about ends. The square root of
emptiness is emptiness. The hungry ghosts are not metaphors. Even the emergency
curtains that protect our hearts have been yanked so far back the strings are broken.
To see is to be terrified, breathless with sight. This morning, with the many-headed
cobra of my aloneness, transferring marigolds from little pots into bigger pots, all
that exhuming and filling – how Buddhist of me, I thought, building a universe
with this cosmic axis of mud. Living so long, and still greedy for the bloom.

Sonnet for the Two Birds in the Mundaka Upanishad

“Two birds, beautiful of wing, close companions, cling to one common tree: of the two one eats the sweet fruit of the tree, the other eats not but watches …”

— Mundaka Upanishad

To be a nibbler. To be bewildered by sorrow.
This is all I know. Long night of rain. I think of you
after the storm, lawn charred, two sparrows
chirruping in the bamboo – the parable of you:

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ego versus everlastingness. All that stuff about
higher and lower branches. The bird below
partaking of fruit, the bird above – witness, devout.
Ask not why your lord isn’t looking out for you,

but why you aren’t looking at him looking
at you (from those higher branches). The birds are one,
of course, if only one would cease its futile hopping.
Goodbye sweet explosions. Goodbye fun.

The chase is real. I understand. In this avalanche
of life, it is better to be free. Even sunlight dies nightly.

Wasps at the Faucet

February, and there are wasps
at the faucet, flying in droves at dusk
to collect water to cool their nests.
They must carry each drop between
their legs without getting their wings wet.
It is a dance we do – me with a broom,
thrusting it between them as though
it were a pitchfork on fire. Their brief
confusion on the battlefield before
surging forward again. If only we could
turn away from each other in disenchantment,
renounce our harvest of sorrows. But here
is the world, egging us on with acres of low
grass, the beginnings of a silver tooth
of moon. Retreat, attack, on your knees.
This is your husk of time, decide.
In the scattering between thirst
and death, what will it be?

Excerpted with permission from Egrets, While War, Tishani Doshi, HarperCollins India.