SARAHANNSWAIN
From Palimpsest
Parvati's Palm
After the Chola bronze at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Precarious, precise
with fingers stained
cast in mehendi;
class transcends caste
Kuá¹…kumam colored;
anointed.
She’s glass-coated guitar strings
peals of mirrored laughter
for being her and breaking for her
Pearled masks,
scattered like champa flowers
cut with red jasmine
Enveloped within intoxicated bruised petals
From depths to sky
trysts
and twine ‘round wrist
from lips wishing
I was her
and she were mine
Wood Thrush
Twigs twist 'round
twine and plastic grocery bags,
Gnarled knotted
branches, precariously
Offer the nest to skyscraper heavens
Veiled in jet trails
and
To paved taxi byways below
Where autumn's
leaves- unbound signatures
Of fallen pamphlets,
Collect in traffic
eddies and
bridges book-end open sky cathedrals
Where walls of
rough-hune shist
sparkle in low sunlight
a suggestion, a
facade of nature in a carefully
constructed landscape
Embedded in
right-angle allusions
To masonry Master's chisel marks
That nest?
Abandoned in
the name of
avian gentrification
At least for the season,
Yet wealthy Snow
Birds may return
Rested, untanned, and
perfectly content to reclaim
the weathered pied
à terre
