He left his weeping father's side,
Exiled and dressed in bark and hide,
With loyal brother, royal wife,
Immaculate for forest life,
And walked an unlit stony street
On tender naked lotus feet,
Beneath the dark and distant clouds,
And heard above the wailing crowds
An echo ringing in his ears.

The echo rang for fourteen years
Until he came back, riding clouds,
To fireworks, drums and dancing crowds
And walked with weary calloused feet
By rows of lamps on every street,
With no desire for palace life,
With hardened brother, tested wife,
And longed to flee, exile and hide
From the festive faces by his side.

A final time in fourteen years
He heard that echo in his ears —
The echo of his father's cries,
Those final, fatal, futile cries.

With lamplit face and lotus eyes
Lord Rama watched the lightless skies,
The high and wide and endless skies,
The high and wide and godless skies.

This land — our land — is not a land for lovers
Like us. Here, innocence hides under covers:
My arm around your waist, your furtive kiss,
Our holding hands in public — yes, even this.

The rains are here. The sudden summer showers.
They fairly fall on both our favorite flowers.
Your roses and my hanging jasmines drown,
Perfuming drops that wash the ground to brown.

I watch impartial rains. I watch for hours.
I watch your home across this street of ours.
Your empty room. The roof of red. The line
For clothes. The flower bed. A home like mine.

No gods or men can tell our homes apart.
And yet they’ve slit your throat and crushed my heart.

I bought a home, a plot of earth.
It does not make a man of worth.
I sought a manor by the water.
The beach is for the seal and otter.
So I searched for rarer air.
Air is cheap and everywhere.
So I thought I'd buy the sky.
But no, a measly crow can fly.

Now all that's left for me is fire.
Now all that's left for me — a pyre.

I rush through life. My world is whirling past.
I tell others the slippery cliche:
"The time will come. I'll stop and breathe at last."

I pause — for tenderness, a song, a cast
Of clouds. That donkey, Time, begins to bray.
I rush through life. My world goes whirling past.

I pause again — to find out what I've lost:
People, places, peace. I resolve and say,
"The time has come. I'll stop and breathe at last."

I'm late. I see that decades unfurled fast
For my parents, aging, half a world away.
I've rushed through life. Their world has whirled and passed.

I see irrecoverable years amassed
Upon their faces. Their eyes, ancient, gray.
Their time will come. They'll stop and breathe their last.

I tell them how I feel. They smile. With vast
Eternal hearts, they set me free and say,
"You rush through life! Your world is whirling past.
Our time has come. Our love will breathe and last."

I sit beside my daughter on her bed.
I cannot see her.
I've peeled and sliced for her
A cold apple.
A faint incandescence glows behind my wife.
I see a silhouette of the table lamp, swaying slightly.
The clock projects the time above me
Upon the ceiling.
From where I sit, the red, digital time reads 85:01.
My daughter crunches on her apple slices.
Soft, hypnotic, crisp.
The night is poised like the glass of wine
At the edge of the bedside table.
A word, a spoken word, like a careless hand,
Will topple the night and make it shatter.

My world is full of fearless girls who fought
Against the world to marry their true love
And lost.
              A few stayed single, rose above
Their grief without an angry, bitter thought
And filled their hearts with books and friends and tea.
But some, by parents, yoked to unknown men,
Resigned to life and smiled just now and then.
Yet others met a stranger destiny —
A stranger husband, then pure domestic bliss:
Roses, letters, caresses, movie dates.
The rest await, refusing assigned fates —
For one more chance at love's elusive kiss.

We say that life deprived of love is death.
We’re wrong. What life requires is hope and breath.

The night is meant for us to speak of eternal things.

Of faded photographs,
Of chicory, coffee and great-grandmothers,
Of protractors, set squares, and trigonometry,
Of slow trips on motorcycles to the blue hills of Santa Cruz,
Of the purple shades of a summer night,
The origins of life,
The origins of the universe,
Or — who knows, who can know — the universes,
Or the origins of our love.

And yet we all are gathered here
Tonight to sit and talk
With a cup of tea in hand
Around this crackling fire
Among our friends and lovers
Upon this sandy beach
Beside these rhythmic waves
Beneath that open sky
Below those distant stars,
To sit and talk and talk
Of politics.

In the distance, a cloud we all agree looks like a cosmic duck.
A white cross and a fluttering flag of the nation
Alongside grazing black cows on a grassy hill.

In the courtyard, running children in uniforms.
Roses and bougainvillea. White flowers whose name I do not know.
A sign says, "Look. Smell. Do not cut."

A sign on the church door says, "Funeral in progress."
The sound of applause breaks like polite waves.
A life is recounted, retold, reduced.

Behind glass, the refectory, scene of silent sacral dinners past.
Behind glass, a calligraphed book of hymns.
Behind glass, vestments from China, Russia, Venice.

Behind glass, Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak on the famed spiral poster.
Behind glass, Hitchcock’s life mask in gold.
I look for the bell tower, scene of the vertiginous final shot.

It’s not here.
It was demolished years before the film was made.
I sought the fact behind the fiction and found that the fact was fiction.

Bread, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, peppers.
We savor rainbow sandwiches by the curb.
Fresh, juicy, messy, filling, fleeting, real.

The varieties of stories we tell ourselves.

Occasionally,
In the presence
Of my wife’s, my mother’s, my daughter’s
Incomprehensible love,
I resolve to take charge
Of my life
And stop
Sleepwalking.

I resolve to become
A better husband
Than the one dreamed of by my wife,
A better son
Than the one conjured by my mother,
A better father
Than the one imagined by my daughter.

Nothing comes of it.

The enchanted moment vanishes.

Life, uncontrollable,
Beats me back with her awesome force.

We picnicked by our cherished lake,
My daughter, wife and I.
The ducks attended. They don’t make
A fuss. They’re born, they fly,
They blow no candles, cut no cake,
They swim on, quack on, die.

I'd like to say sorry —
It’s been years, but I’d like to say it —
To the old woman at the cafe
At the Rotterdam station.

I’m sorry
I didn’t speak your language.
I’m sorry
I snatched
That croissant
From your wrinkled hands.

It was warm.
It was fragrant.
It was mine.

The train was about to leave.
My girlfriend was on the train, waiting.
We were young
And so, so hungry.

Innumerable atoms
Forged in innumerable stars
Journeyed past inconceivable space
Across inconceivable time
To conceive me
Who conceives this.

Today was my birthday.

We picnicked at our beloved lake,
My daughter, wife and I.
On our way back home, I noticed
Our car’s orange warning light.
It said, “Service due.”

And I thought:

Today is my service day.

I’ll change my moral oil,
Replace my mental filters
Refill the washer fluid
For the windshield of my mind,
So I can see the world afresh
Through a clean and sparkling heart.

I’ll grease my brakes so I can stop
With grace
And look back one more time
At things that I have left behind
Before they vanish
In my rear-view mirror
Or overtake and pass me by forever.

I’ll repair the curb rashes
Of the year that is past
And recommit to drive with love
My wife, my daughter,
My fellow passengers for life.

I’ll be my own mechanic of self
Until my body runs and runs
And runs out of gas
And mortal oil
And shudders
And sputters
And stops.

When I'll be old and full of pains
And cracking bones and clogged up veins,
I know I’ll meet my final breath
And laugh — and welcome paltry death.

For I’m a desi — I’ll depart
With paneer makhni in my heart.

Herr Carl Gauss was a son of a gun
who constructed the monstrous heptadecagon.
He wrote agonizing eponymous theorems
and demented treatises on magnetic mediums.
It is indisputable that this scientist
was truly a despicable sadist,
for who else would make quadratic equations
have roots that are complex abominations?
It is Gaussian noise that I hear
when heavy metal assaults my ear.
Let it be said now! His sense of music
was physick.
Mr. Gauss is everywhere.
In functions and eliminations
and equations and interpolations.
He did not spare even gravitation
but his worst is surely the normal distribution.
Oh yes, he is everywhere.
If science were Italian cuisine, Mr. Gauss
would be sauce.
(And if you please
Mr. Newton can be cheese.)
This German is quite a pein in die auss.
Even my car sometimes runs out of Gauss.

May the scientists of the world
Have the genius and the wisdom
To invent that drug.

The drug
That sparks feelings of universal love
And bridges chasms
In the minds of men and women.

The drug
To fortify wills
And metalize spines
And unroll the dice
Of birth and fortune and faith.

The drug
To treat
Not fathers nor mothers nor uncles nor aunts
Nor the fading generations of an unchanging world
But to medicate the youth
Of our vast and ancient lands
And inoculate them
Against the prejudice and the cowardice
That corrupt my repentant heart.