Monsoon Poem

Because this is a monsoon poem

expect to find the words jasmine,

palmyra, Kuruntokai, red; mangoes

in reference to trees or breasts; paddy

fields, peacocks, Kurinji flowers,

flutes; lotus buds guarding love’s

furtive routes. Expect to hear a lot

about erotic consummation inferred

by laburnum gyrations and bamboo

syncopations. Listen to the racket

of wide-mouthed frogs and bent-

legged prawns going about their

business of mating while rain falls

and falls on tiled roofs and verandas,

courtyards, pagodas. Because such

a big part of you seeks to understand

this kind of rain — so unlike your cold

rain, austere rain, get-me-the-hell-

out-of-here rain. Rain that can’t fathom

how to liberate camphor from the vaults

of the earth. Let me tell you how little

is written of mud, how it sneaks up

like a sleek-gilled vandal to catch hold

of your ankles. Or about the restorative

properties of mosquito blood, dappled

and fried against the wires of a bug-zapping

paddle. So much of monsoon is to do

with being overcome — not from longing

as you might think, but from the sky’s

steady bludgeoning, until every leaf

on every unremembered tree gleams

in the abyss of postcoital bliss.

Come. Now sip on your masala tea,

put your lips to the sweet, spicy skin

of it. There’s more to see — notice

the dogs who’ve been fucking on the beach,

locked in embrace like an elongated Anubis,

the crabs scavenging the flesh of a dopey-

eyed ponyfish, the entire delirious coast

with its philtra of beach and saturnine

clouds arched backwards in disbelief.

And the mayflies who swarm in November

with all their ephemeral grandeur to die

in millions at the behest of light, the geckos

stationed on living room walls, cramming

fistfuls of wings in their maws. Notice

how hardly anyone mentions the word

death, even though the fridge leaks

and the sheets have been damp for weeks.

And in this helter-skelter multitude

of gray-greenness, notice how even the rain

begins to feel fatigued. The roads and sewers

have nowhere to go, and like old-fashioned pursuers

they wander and spill their babbling hearts

to electrical poles and creatures with ears.

And what happens later, you might ask,

after we’ve moved to a place of shelter,

when the cracks in the earth have reappeared?

We dream of wet, of course, of being submerged

in millet stalks, of webbed toes and stalled

clocks and eels in the mouth of a heron.

We forget how unforgivably those old poems

led us to believe that men were mountains,

that the beautiful could never remain

heartbroken, that when the rains arrive

we should be delighted to be taken

in drowning, in devotion.