‘I found it’s even okay / not to have questions’: A new world within the folds of the old

The World Breaks

When I want to speak of what counts,
I return to the fact

that there’s always a woman in a yellow sari
outside the Taj Mahal.

I want to say that when I once
went down in a submarine

and saw fish shivering past,
their gazes incurious,

wetly amoral,
against the foaming detergent

of an ocean floor, I found it’s even okay
not to have questions

about our true element,
that overwater,

we will always
be out of our depth,

and the man in the gabardine suit
will always

(like the rest of us)
be a spy,

which makes it as simple
as buying the groceries, house-sitting the cat,

and being the medicine,
unique and unlabelled,

for someone at the other end of the line.
The world breaks

(how it breaks) –
eggshells, china cups, countries, bones and all –
and still,

the woman in a yellow sari
outside the Taj Mahal

And Suddenly It’s Evening

[after Salvatore Quasimodo]

Above your head,
the Grownups speak
of deleted bus stops

and renamed streets
and how they cycled to school
across lathering rivers of paddy,

long replaced
by the municipal corporation
and the city improvement trust colony.

You snooze fitfully,
and now you must be grownup
because the Grownups

now have grandsons
who vigorously trim
hedge funds in Atlanta,

and you think back often
on an Irani café
that once hung precariously

over a cracked ceramic sea
where you sipped a man’s dark
and endless mouth,

while your nieces call to tell you
that they’re climbing mountains
and counselling the dying.

When roofs...

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