Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
SARAH’S VISIT, WITH NADIA, TO THE CAVES AT AJANTA
As if their story was a seed, Amanda,
that fell by chance into some stone niche and nursed
by warm air and rain
spun fine filaments of root to earth
and is the small forest in which they wander.
On the wall in glittering anklets the painted beauties danced.
Self-contained and gossamer. Sarah and Nadia
followed into the disallowed and all that
within their own limbs leapt.
HIMALAYA
Go. Summon all the mountains, says Himalaya.
The ash-smeared god wants my daughter.
(At his feet silver river veins, banana leaves, lemons,
trekkers on trails gaping up.)
They come, their faces grim:
Manaslu.
Gasherbrum I.
Dhaulagiri.
The Annapurnas.
K2.
Kanchenjunga.
Lhotse.
These,
that Franz was always going on about, that we’d beheld
from the valley floor where we waited for avalanche sound
to roll over and smother us, that Meissner the crazy German
and some other guy had climbed without oxygen,
can’t decide.
It lies with the god and girl.
The sleeping bag between them on the cold floor.
The girl has made up her mind but she’s not a god.
NADIA, IT TURNS OUT, IS A RIVER
Can make case for Durgā marry Buffalo Demon, said Nadia, plaiting her pale hair.
Very rich, handsome, with army, track record, has real estate of all gods.
Jason thought we had two more weeks of her at least but then she wrapped herself
in the Godavari and fled east to where the sea
unraveled her tawny edges into lead and silver, leaving us
suddenly tributaries offering all we had, our wan elixir
leached from villages each with its elders and gods of illness.
We’re going to myth her, said Lee to Glen, who had arrived the day before,
from Hyderabad, with Jim.
EVENING, ROOF OF THE GUESTHOUSE, PUSHKAR, RAJASTHAN
As the man and woman stand in jeans holding hands
looking out at the lake, a pregnant cow in a nearby lane
nuzzles clots of garbage that squabble and scuttle away.
After the man turns, gently removing her necklace, dipping it
in the cistern three times, and after he holds it up against
the backdrop of the town and she steps away,
hands over her mouth, the two waiting crows depart,
leaving him, as she does, leaving him standing there
by the pink and yellow saris hung out to dry
in the imperceptible breeze that is, this evening, filled
with a fine dust invisible except as a corona
gilding everything not already in shadow.
VARANASI II
What we have brought here in our hand
What we have here under our hand will not fall away
It has attached itself it has become
An attachment
An attachment that will never leave
A petal that is not fragile
A bronze marigold, maybe
Something gold falls to earth and rolls away
Something cold falls and rolls away
One thing the one thing that would never leave
Became cold and rolled away when we arrived
Here was where the god brought His great sin in His hand
It followed Him as he wandered
The fell thing followed Him
It was His fell attachment
That never left Him
But when He arrived at the river it fell from His hand
Here on the riverbank He will never leave
The day broke and I found the crown of your head under my hand
In what worlds were you I wondered
Where in the gold worlds did you wander
While parrots scolded themselves in the neem trees and the warm where my body had been
Rose into cold air
In the new light I could see your head, all gold, under my hand
In a new light your gold head
And it fell away
It fell away here
I will carry here back with me, she thought
I will bring it back with me
Under my hand invisible through customs in some cavity
No head will attach itself to my hand
I will find no head, ever, under my hand
Here will never leave, it will be everywhere with me
YEARS LATER, SINGAPORE
In the evenings it’s gods in the mirrors, bronze
and heavily-armed: Glocks, camo, Marlboros, Ray-Bans
the distinguishing iconography of the highly-muscular.
All these stories, she thought, and not
a riveting past life or parable in sight.
Let me go over this again for you
here at the Long Bar:
compared to that moment in Durga’s shrine,
when in the dark we swore,
no Buffalo Demon stepping down
from an unmarked chopper matters.
LATER
Later I remembered looking up at our window
that could never have opened out
onto mornings thick with frangipani and dung-fire,
nor offered, in the middle distance, a view
of the old banyan by the well,
whose branch-threads, reaching down,
each one imagining itself the core of a new forest,
are adorned with small shreds
of sere cloth printed with prayers
or the hand-written pleas of the soldier’s wife,
who, as we were told upon our arrival,
buried her bracelets one afternoon
and then walked, behind her dark eyes,
toward the banks of the river.
In that life, Ananda, I was the soldier
Notes to the Poems
“One Afternoon Sarah Gets Lost in the Street of Butchers/The Goddess Durgā Promises Blessings”
The text in italics is drawn from translations of the Devimahatmya, Ch. 12.26-29.
“Nadia, It Turns Out, Is a River”
At her birth, Durgā, the Goddess as Warrior, was given all the gods’ powers so that she could battle Mahisha, the Great Buffalo Demon, who had driven the gods from heaven, earth, and the underworld. Durgā refuses Mahisha’s offer of marriage,and after defeating his army, beheads him.
“Later”
Ananda was a much-loved disciple of the Buddha. Many of the Jataka Tales (“Birth Stories” from the Buddha’s prior lives) were told to Ananda.
Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. is a poet, translator, and corporate consultant. Her collection of poems, Series | India will be published by Four Way Books in April 2015. Her translations from classical and contemporary Persian include The Green Sea ofHeaven: Fifty Ghazals from the Diwan-i Hafiz-i Shirazi (1995) and Iran: Poems of Dissent (2013). Sections of the Tibeto-Mongolian folk epic “The Life of King Kesar of Ling,” co-translated with Dr. Siddiq Wahid of the University of Kashmir,were included in Columbia University Press’s Sources of Tibetan Tradition (2013) and appeared in The Harvard Review Online. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in Little Star, The Kenyon Review Online, New England Review,Ploughshares, AGNI, The Harvard Review, Best New Poets 2012, and elsewhere. She was the founding CEO/Managing Partner of Conflict Management, Inc. and Alliance Management Partners, consulting firms that assisted global corporationsand government form, manage and repair complex inter-organizational alliances. She has a B.A. and J. D. from Harvard University and an M. F. A. from Warren Wilson College. www.elizabethtgrayjr.com.
SARAH’S VISIT, WITH NADIA, TO THE CAVES AT AJANTA
As if their story was a seed, Amanda,
that fell by chance into some stone niche and nursed
by warm air and rain
spun fine filaments of root to earth
and is the small forest in which they wander.
On the wall in glittering anklets the painted beauties danced.
Self-contained and gossamer. Sarah and Nadia
followed into the disallowed and all that
within their own limbs leapt.
HIMALAYA
Go. Summon all the mountains, says Himalaya.
The ash-smeared god wants my daughter.
(At his feet silver river veins, banana leaves, lemons,
trekkers on trails gaping up.)
They come, their faces grim:
Manaslu.
Gasherbrum I.
Dhaulagiri.
The Annapurnas.
K2.
Kanchenjunga.
Lhotse.
These,
that Franz was always going on about, that we’d beheld
from the valley floor where we waited for avalanche sound
to roll over and smother us, that Meissner the crazy German
and some other guy had climbed without oxygen,
can’t decide.
It lies with the god and girl.
The sleeping bag between them on the cold floor.
The girl has made up her mind but she’s not a god.
NADIA, IT TURNS OUT, IS A RIVER
Can make case for Durgā marry Buffalo Demon, said Nadia, plaiting her pale hair.
Very rich, handsome, with army, track record, has real estate of all gods.
Jason thought we had two more weeks of her at least but then she wrapped herself
in the Godavari and fled east to where the sea
unraveled her tawny edges into lead and silver, leaving us
suddenly tributaries offering all we had, our wan elixir
leached from villages each with its elders and gods of illness.
We’re going to myth her, said Lee to Glen, who had arrived the day before,
from Hyderabad, with Jim.
EVENING, ROOF OF THE GUESTHOUSE, PUSHKAR, RAJASTHAN
As the man and woman stand in jeans holding hands
looking out at the lake, a pregnant cow in a nearby lane
nuzzles clots of garbage that squabble and scuttle away.
After the man turns, gently removing her necklace, dipping it
in the cistern three times, and after he holds it up against
the backdrop of the town and she steps away,
hands over her mouth, the two waiting crows depart,
leaving him, as she does, leaving him standing there
by the pink and yellow saris hung out to dry
in the imperceptible breeze that is, this evening, filled
with a fine dust invisible except as a corona
gilding everything not already in shadow.
VARANASI II
What we have brought here in our hand
What we have here under our hand will not fall away
It has attached itself it has become
An attachment
An attachment that will never leave
A petal that is not fragile
A bronze marigold, maybe
Something gold falls to earth and rolls away
Something cold falls and rolls away
One thing the one thing that would never leave
Became cold and rolled away when we arrived
Here was where the god brought His great sin in His hand
It followed Him as he wandered
The fell thing followed Him
It was His fell attachment
That never left Him
But when He arrived at the river it fell from His hand
Here on the riverbank He will never leave
The day broke and I found the crown of your head under my hand
In what worlds were you I wondered
Where in the gold worlds did you wander
While parrots scolded themselves in the neem trees and the warm where my body had been
Rose into cold air
In the new light I could see your head, all gold, under my hand
In a new light your gold head
And it fell away
It fell away here
I will carry here back with me, she thought
I will bring it back with me
Under my hand invisible through customs in some cavity
No head will attach itself to my hand
I will find no head, ever, under my hand
Here will never leave, it will be everywhere with me
YEARS LATER, SINGAPORE
In the evenings it’s gods in the mirrors, bronze
and heavily-armed: Glocks, camo, Marlboros, Ray-Bans
the distinguishing iconography of the highly-muscular.
All these stories, she thought, and not
a riveting past life or parable in sight.
Let me go over this again for you
here at the Long Bar:
compared to that moment in Durga’s shrine,
when in the dark we swore,
no Buffalo Demon stepping down
from an unmarked chopper matters.
LATER
Later I remembered looking up at our window
that could never have opened out
onto mornings thick with frangipani and dung-fire,
nor offered, in the middle distance, a view
of the old banyan by the well,
whose branch-threads, reaching down,
each one imagining itself the core of a new forest,
are adorned with small shreds
of sere cloth printed with prayers
or the hand-written pleas of the soldier’s wife,
who, as we were told upon our arrival,
buried her bracelets one afternoon
and then walked, behind her dark eyes,
toward the banks of the river.
In that life, Ananda, I was the soldier
Notes to the Poems
“One Afternoon Sarah Gets Lost in the Street of Butchers/The Goddess Durgā Promises Blessings”
The text in italics is drawn from translations of the Devimahatmya, Ch. 12.26-29.
“Nadia, It Turns Out, Is a River”
At her birth, Durgā, the Goddess as Warrior, was given all the gods’ powers so that she could battle Mahisha, the Great Buffalo Demon, who had driven the gods from heaven, earth, and the underworld. Durgā refuses Mahisha’s offer of marriage,and after defeating his army, beheads him.
“Later”
Ananda was a much-loved disciple of the Buddha. Many of the Jataka Tales (“Birth Stories” from the Buddha’s prior lives) were told to Ananda.
Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. is a poet, translator, and corporate consultant. Her collection of poems, Series | India will be published by Four Way Books in April 2015. Her translations from classical and contemporary Persian include The Green Sea ofHeaven: Fifty Ghazals from the Diwan-i Hafiz-i Shirazi (1995) and Iran: Poems of Dissent (2013). Sections of the Tibeto-Mongolian folk epic “The Life of King Kesar of Ling,” co-translated with Dr. Siddiq Wahid of the University of Kashmir,were included in Columbia University Press’s Sources of Tibetan Tradition (2013) and appeared in The Harvard Review Online. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in Little Star, The Kenyon Review Online, New England Review,Ploughshares, AGNI, The Harvard Review, Best New Poets 2012, and elsewhere. She was the founding CEO/Managing Partner of Conflict Management, Inc. and Alliance Management Partners, consulting firms that assisted global corporationsand government form, manage and repair complex inter-organizational alliances. She has a B.A. and J. D. from Harvard University and an M. F. A. from Warren Wilson College. www.elizabethtgrayjr.com.