Night piece, Himachal Pradesh
All night: riverboom
Water roars out of ice
the high snow
where renunciate males
observe breathing
All night on these terraced hills
drums torches’ flicker
Indians are praying singing
God into a village
Next door a Canadian
Sanskrit scholar
tries to sleep
in the lotus position
His wife cries on my friend
Downstairs American collectivists
fight with their children
This afternoon they regarded us gravely:
two vain constructions
all angles & words
Our Indian neighbour
is weaving a blanket to sell
His wife suckles their youngest
The stack of rushes she cut today
sped on her back
in a harness
down hundreds of sure-footed metres –
a cliffside path –
The stack was twice her height
three times her girth –
dried it will go into quilts
against the cold
Now summer candle wax pools
on a plank’s raw sun tracks
No moon but a remote
star-cluster is The Pleiades –
‘a swarm of fireflies
tangled in a silver braid’
Tennyson wrote –
he’s far away
Closer in the forest
by the river
late 20th century fireflies
swarm
& spin the darkness
like a raksha’s eyes
Rough spirits guard this valley
where town lights
networked close along the river
form a yoni –
coincidentally
map a Goddess part
on Shiva’s inky carbon –
Water roars
Illusions burn