New Year’s Eve

Night is a rush of noise, an Indian hilltown train
steaming up gradients through Himalayan tunnels,

morning the destination, quiet as a mountain-top
after the snow has melted, celebrants have left:

a  

Shimla  

of  

the  

mind,  

its  

local  

aspirations  

–  

work,
money,  

kinship,  

health;  

a  

time  

to  

think  

things  

over,

let them settle in the recesses of imagination.
They’ll raise their heads of their own accord, lean

out of carriages to wave. For now is the time
of watering the splendid platform displays, of

gathering at The Ridge, the Scandal Point in the mall,
fingering  

oak  

and  

rosewood  

souvenirs.  

In  

Shimla,

mashkis will be carrying goatskin bags of water,
sluicing down the tarmac while I, at the last

hill station of the year, will bring the silence in,
fold  

it  

like  

a  

three-flower  

Kullu  

shawl  

on  

my  

table.

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The Cloud Sarcophagus

When I looked up, I was astonished at the muscularity
of clouds that were rearing up from a marble frieze

in high relief on a sarcophagus of blue. But whose?
Alexander’s  

routing  

the  

Persians?  

Or  

Abdalonymus

the gardener king’s, crowned by his very conqueror?
Now they revolved from war to peace and back again

but either way their spears were drawn, warriors, huntsmen,
lions snarling as they went, bundling up their hind legs

as if melting were a kind of leaping in slow motion.
And  

the  

cubs  

that  

littered  

their  

wake,  

play-fighting,

pouncing, rolling on their backs, were melting too,
panting, paws outstretched. What is to melt?

Into love, into war? Piece by piece to disintegrate
and reaccumulate into a giant maw that swallows

a sun, a planet, like a ball in a baseball mitt,
a  

perfect  

fit,  

while  

the  

jaw,  

the  

hand,  

fragment?

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