Today, I must thank you;wherever you are I know, blacksand’s clogged your throat. Look at the sugar-ant—a terrifying grimace on its face,wringing its feet, feeding on my memory: allthat I have of you.All that I have of you—a picture: three sisters, a father & your dead mother.This evening, as always, they mustwear their fine masks of derision,twisted with lies—But your impossibly antiquefeatures, the time-shapedpurest flesh under your dressonce held in my hands, jabbed atlike a woodpecker, was myinheritance.                                  One day perhapsa poet will speakyour splashing arms, of the deadman who wrote the greencolumnar plantain trees,of bunches of golden plantains, maybeof the tremblingfinger-like leavesbefore your window—(there were too, twocalamander chairs, a plant-pot & twodusty hands, with candlesticksbefore the piano—your mother’s).Once I had sat on the oldest thronein the country, heard the peacock screaminside my head:I had drunk of the Castalianfountain the Latin poets calledthe source of all inspiration.They over-rode all that—but your sleek legsfacing me—the landscape I lost …the endless banter leaping on my shoulders:swords, guns, the broken shaftof an impaling stickthrown in the garage, & ever angry,your mother’s: “We are not criminals!”—I think the river-lamp’s gone dead that Icarry to light the smallanecdotes swimming insidemy head—Mandelshtam, beaten to his kneesin prison, is what I wanted to say—is dead. Ihave three book-racks. I go trampingremote temples now, peeringat old murals crumbling to dust.The fruitful bats in their screeching concertnever see them as the elephants bringthe rains in. For the monsoons were builtfive roofs here.I see the sun on a red column& the blue monkey sitting on it.I know nothing of you—the guns are ready, grenades piled high, bayonetsgleaming. They say, we are not the first,we are your friends, & we shall not be the last—A cluster of areca trees are beautifulwhen you come upon them in a grassy clearing.Leeches suck away the bad blood from my face.Wars fought then were different, but theystill go on—They stillgo on.