Life's Asylum

Life's Asylum

Uroborus

To see the cobra's green gold rise
from its basket, those frightened eyes
pinned to the measly lizard inside
its hood, pharaoh-bright, sanctified,
glittering in scales of armor,
who's to say who's the charmer,
who's the charmed, what it is that binds
each body to the other's mind?

Who could listen to the long strand
of music passing through those hands
unbroken and not feel a bit
deceived, to think his wind could slip
into a circle outward and back,
as if his breathing were a snake
swallowing its own tail? A trick,
true, how he floats the reedy brook

of air, inhaling as he blows,
cheeks puffed like an organ bellow.
It lures the snake, however deaf,
just so close, no closer, adrift
in a shadow-charm of the charm,
the serpentine S a wind-chime
where it wavers, brushed by the oboe's
shyest movement. What the cobra

senses, God knows. Still it's human
to pick at the lock of Heaven,
that look of rapture's river-mill
spilling over, cell after cell
of the wheel weighted to the brim
and falling, the sheer momentum
like a stillness in the bloodstream,
each cycle consuming, consumed.

We who listen in the Bombay sun—
tourists mostly, local children—
some of us are lost to our own
mantra, our own black column of wind.
Not that hazard alone is
charm enough, but how some silence,
some core of creature solitude
there, keeps dying into a tune

we love, like a corpse hemmed in blooms
and candles, in life's asylum.
Sunlight slowly trails its bright ash
above us. Nearby a midday flash
and honk of cabs, the occasional
fruit truck eager for arrival.
What song could travel far here, save
the one we take up as we leave

our petty cash? How it tempts us:
to see the soul as karma's tourist,
fearful and enamored, a fresh
dread returning, flesh after flesh.
Deathless, the blood's mute flirtation
with blood, watering a tongue
in music: with every sweet sting
of the reed, a poison rising.

Blind Rain

Rare enough: the night that struck
so late in life, his eyes gone dark,

white with age, the milk that blinds,
though stranger still: the way of the mind

as it too dimmed, how memory's map
dissolved beneath a fading lamp,

so even the arms of October
trees drew the stars into their embers,

and what hung above was the wet
slate of dreamless sleep, no west

to steer by, so little sense of here
there, though year after year

he scattered the net of his will
and reckoning—how fierce the world

in all its weather, the wind, yes,
which, as he listened, was the flesh

of many winds, the brittle rake
of a single leaf, a nervous gate,

the mindless ticking of the latch,
or now and then the black lash

of rain which, as he listened, was
many rains, the kind that sizzles

on the naked pavement, or taps
in a drunken stagger on the step,

the papery fluster of the hosta,
the vine, the nibbling of the grass,

the rickety marimba that is
a garden fence, its battered ribs,

and overhead the great elation
of oak thrashing in its constellation.

And so, in the rhythm of the sky
gone to pieces, he heard the shy

awakening of things, the sounds
settling over sounds, like hands

that read some long forgotten face
in the distance, that softly trace

the lips that flinch there, cold, surprised,
the trembling of the closed eyes.