(at the ashram of Ramana Maharishi, Tiruvannamalai)
I don’t make sense of it yet
but it’s all right for me to be here.
Here in this silence, dark as an old granary,
veined by the screech of peacocks,
and from the kitchen beyond,
the murmured cadences, tamarind-brown,
of a language I once blindly trusted.
And outside the window always
the opaque magic
of Arunachala –
the harsh grandeur
of grace, distilled
in rock and light and gaunt shadow.
It feels like given time
I could understand something here
about the eczemas
of grief and rage and grief,
about weekdays that must follow weekends,
the mintgreen underbelly
of grime-roughened thought.
It will come again,
the fear of the darkening flesh,
of watching the self turn to rind.
But for now this is enough.
For somewhere here, I know,
is something black,
something large,
something limpid,
something like home.