Sabarmati
This same river and its unregarded threads
remain an immaculate housework running
to clear away the pins
or fading stars, yet are a cruelty
gone unrecognized but ending
somehow better than before.
Hawa Mahal
The night awakening withdraws. Brought,
not at first light, but touch.
Its smell pervades the presidential clothes.
The same can be said for us.
Because of crocodiles, how to cross over
where the other side was?
Letting there be an hour inbetween,
not letting the heart fill with someone else’s,
nor letting it fall from these lips on careless ears.
Prevailing winds willfully removed provide
happier solutions: ones whose recent, present,
unmanifest elements we stray from, unimagined.
Anything needing doing in these fields is done
walking without shoes on, straight ahead. Then
allowed as reward, we rule Egypt and the Rajasthan.
Routine Submission
Never common on islands,
through greater land masses
highlight a few occasions when
their remaining adjectives
along with some details
are put in relief.
There’d been before that the parked car
in a park. That mattress on the floor.
The dark. There was some kind of
pastoral surface. Shepherds.
Not an automatic account, wiping the mouth
intermittently. One interrupted.
The ledger destroyed, an old man kept.
The handwriting
is cramped and hard to read.
The story familiar, someone in unknown territory.
An hour ago. Three thirty.
At the center of the garden
—or at the center of part of it.