---for Savita and Berthan

 

Two goats. And Laxshman who holds

my one-year-old grandson. I follow them.

The path leads through underbrush

to another path. Bearing right leads

to huts silhouetted against a dusk sky.

I once lived here. Now I don't. Who

is the refugee and who isn't and what,

if anything, does the Red Cross worker know

about those who can't hear the flowers' covert tamboras

because of the hospitals in their ears?

Yesterday my niece was married. And tonight,

behind me, the old pump factory compound's lit up

like a heart electrified by an excess of knowledge.

Laxshman ties the goats to a post. Here, a figure

inside a dark doorway, shoes off, a

child in his arms. Me. And Laxshman's mother

offering a stool to sit on. I say, "I can only

stay a minute." What the village knows is what

everything knows: actual dirt paths, described

in the mind or on

a hard drive or written page, aren't themselves the paths

that crisscross a hillside east of Gasneshpur Rd.

Still, I'm here. Somewhere. Back

to the compound now. The newlyweds

already there. Amidst the fertile presence

of the absence of drill presses and lathes, people gather

as they do everywhere, wanting to believe

that tomorrow, if it exists, is worth it and that

far away a quiet camel trail emerges from

the homemade rocket launcher while in the mosque 

the prayer rug unfolds as the shooting fades and the only

artillery is the rose's redness along the ancient river.

Here is a hut. And here a gathering. And here

a grandson sleeps in a room.