Everywoman’s life. Shall I call her,

that is each woman, by name or

shall I call them all, She?

—Mina Loy

Ghazal 1

You smell impure, she says of women. She eats its ashes—

the fire flies in all directions. Her lips burn. There are no children.

Not yet fifteen. Lured to cross the kala pani. The penalty

ten linked chains and a cacophony of imbeciles: indenture.

Into whose paradises, whose hells? The white seers, blue sugar canes.

Fijians in the kava ritual drunk beyond apparent logic, mockery’s fair game.

The evil ‘lines’ and the rarity of women.

Caan and Abel without rival. Fiji jungles of Methodists.

The farm life, a meld of caste, fish in boxes, those ‘tins’. Nadala leaves.

Large bunches of dried grasses, to keep head lice from the bed.

A toddler tied to her mother’s cot, kept from the well

by the reach of her invalid’s switch. A father lives a spell, tourist hells.

Another Sunday in August

Just as we round the corner, the field’s

mown grass is visible as green-brown

stubble. The burnt house has weathered

another winter, its sun-browned stomach shines

in the sun as if still tanning and the swallows dipped

in the pond-side mud, swerve to miss the electric lines,

unafraid of the men still mowing this end of the farm

while the old farmer, nicknamed Cadthu, or pumpkin

when young, scratches his head, cap in hand, talking

to the yawning tenant, about the thefts from his trailers,

that are unending, linked stories by an unseasoned novelist,

and he muses that they never catch ’em at it, still everyone

except him has seen ’em. While at the cottage his teenage daughters

and a friend stand at the tap, washing their legs and arms of wet clay

caking their skin and Nikes, as she tells them of what it was

like during that fieldwork year in Fiji. The muddy fields,

her thongs caked, and sari raised around her knobby knees

going to a village wedding all wet earth, field dirtied.

Homage to a Frieze

Wound around, stone.

No, it wraps and winds its way around the temple.

These women with their mango breasts and ample hips,

still and looking boldly at you and me, voyeurs

for centuries. Khujaraho.

French Lace

She was just home from the hospital,

as I went in she looked up at me

pulled back the sheet that covered

her chest, the scar where one breast

used to be. She smiled, shy, sleepily

told me that her surgeon is a woman

who loves needle work; who makes

fine laces, and embroideries. “And this is mine,

the surgeon made it for me,” she said proudly.

She can see the gash with its redness

and brittle threads as the finest French Val lace

with baby beading, or French Maline, single loop

tatting, or other open-work and tracery. Perhaps

it is. Fearlessly, I looked

at its exquisiteness.

And already in its dark grove

the train is waiting with its breath of ashes

—Louise Glück

Sonnets for My Father—(three from a ‘crown’ of seven sonnets)

I

I remember that day, it was six. I lived in town.

I’d come home from the office tired and drained.

Suddenly: A panic. I was beside my bed, sunk down

on my knees. Me, who never thought of it, prayed.

Oh! God what is this feeling? What is this knowing?

I thought of the plane—they were flying to Germany.

Something’s wrong. What is it? An angel warning.

The phone rang. Even in its cradle—it tolled gethsemane.

The kind of calls we fear most. Was it them?

My youngest brother said, come home right away.

What’s wrong? Kuldip, it’s Daddy. The doctor, then

on the line, said, Kuldip, your father’s sick, today . . .

Replied, yes, when I asked, is he in the hospital?

Said, come home right away—do you drive at all?

II

He said, come home right away—do you drive at all?

What has happened. What has happened? I was afraid

it would be about a plane gone down. But that call

was about my Dad. My Dad? That moment I stayed

frozen on the edge of the bed then as a whirlwind

I flew around, readied myself, to go home. To my dad.

I was always needed in times like these. We send

for the eldest. I had to see for myself how sick he was, how bad.

It seemed to take hours to drive home to Mission.

Excruciatingly slowly the valley passed by my window.

At times someone at the side of the road, an illusion,

I thought could be my second brother (or some foe?)

standing car-less, unable to go home to what waited

keep going. These things tried to tell me something, conveyed

III

keep going. These things tried to tell me something, conveyed

to us. It took nerve to drive by, to tell myself, no it’s not

my younger brothers. I knew they too had the message relayed.

Some message. I read it—but wrong. My heart on a blue stalk.

Home. The men stood: crossed arms, in front of the house.

Uncles, neighbours, other men who came to us, grieving

too, in our grieving. My brave middle brother, his spouse

carrying his first child. My father only saw the conceiving

mother-to-be, not his grandchild, their first baby. He was gone

too soon. Now Hal, the eldest boy got the turban of succession

the men came to put it on his head as the firstborn son.

As an adult he’d never worn one. His hair shorn when he was seven.

He was brave. He saw that I couldn’t bear to see my father dead.

Tenderly: It’s ok, you can go and see Daddy, my brother said,

Almost a Glosa—for Jim

The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.

There you are—cased in clear bark you drift

Through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.

You are free. The river films with lilies,

—Louise Glück, “The Undertaking”

Did you imagine how far we’d travel? Us.

The day we met, sitting across the table

from each other at Moishe’s? You across

from her, and me from him. They talked.

We smiled, then you called. At that time

I doubted anyone could be so kind. Imagine.

We are wont to pull in against the tides.

But, above that we’ve managed to

undertake us. Our lives. See—shapes shift.

There you are—cased in clear bark you drift

along. A hot sun blazed through windows of a blue buick.

Miles of green scent rising from lines of rutted furrows

seeped up from the ground into the car.

From somewhere—the synapses or amygdala,

came the call of memory. I knew it—the smell acrid,

nostalgic. My mother’s hands full of white cotton.

She walked in, vanished, reappeared, through unripe

recall. Plato’s tabula abrasa. Now in the valley

near San Jose, or was it Fresno? Back in Faridkot?

Through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.

You are free. The river films with lilies, the far bank

shallow. The chortling stream flows over white

rocks, grey flecked granite. Hard and unforgiving

though they seem. A place to dangle our feet and sit

in wonder. It seems that we have come far, near

to be in this place. The peace. I have survived my life.

Drive on, it will be hours yet before we stop to rest.

The road winds down river banks, edges of arroyos.

There, see? The moon’s long rays on water frills.

You are free. The river films with lilies.