Potatoes

Wishlist -
Death working
its way up

Winter, her face
translates everything

No birds in the sky
I came and went
as told

Parched throat
Half of every life
spent screaming

Coughing blood
into the sink
the ocean rises

Not enough wind
comes this way
Not word from her either

The moon lies still
a spider in my head
weaves the rest

Benzylhidrinithium !
try guessing chemistry

The brewery on fire
seeing her
in a new light

Unexpected deaths
I would do better
I think

Clouds close to water
slurrpp slurrpp slurrpp

Grazing-
touched by warmth
in the grave

Old silence
  snow breaks
on the nonliving

Sunday noon
a firecrest unlikely
to slow it down

the four seasons
     only autumn with two
languages to learn

  Water in the dog's ears
  A thing so uninterrupted

Grandma's old watch
Cancer ticks first

And the river turns

Disdain, had its eye on fire.
Shadows of dandelions used to fall
across my feet - where I now stand -
as did my children. Renting
life in each other's arms, under
that little pride we chose not to weep.
They raped, but left my wife only cut,
and me from the inside, forever lit

as I began to hear more in the dark.
About the menstrual sickness,
the turning of the book shelf,
boiling of the antelope's horns
in a town far, far from here,
where a feast prepared - they
called it the holocaust - of her
body as soup, and my brain as the bone.

Yellow gloves of contentment

Mid-July, we sat, with our
hands inside yellow gloves
as I tried not to look through
every blasted hole .
We were henchmen, of
seeking-the-white-in-smoke
Trees, even the ones
I visualized, burned down.
Grandma now, stood alone
in front of the Taj Mahal.

How the fish would have
contemplated swimming in
boiling water, or how the
neighbour dog would have
tucked in, the tongue that so loosely
hangs, a little while after it started -
these were softening glances, Maa said,
of eyes that had now opened
inside of us - but need not speak now.
Father, she said, needed
the quietness - it was worse enough
his food tasted like ash
even in office.