Walking in the Bowl of Dust

Black weave of your coat, daughter-in-law, becomes your beauty.
Your stockings, high heels, the twist of your hair finish the setting.

We have broken mirrors at the doorstep of this house in chains,
we have fed the roosters yellow ground corn powdery as dust,
before setting off for Hyde Park in the first hours of summer.

There we will meet the horsy set, child-men and child-women
who move from tennis game to tennis game like ripples in water,
amid their beaus and charges, long-limbed and well-fed, as if on
the unseen flesh of the land rising each time before the count to ten.

Beryl, my daughter, asked the kinds of questions we were taught
in grade school not to ask, except at the risk of our sanity.
None of my sort wanted to land in Huysmans House watched by sentries.

Along the highway we will pass steel carriages of the horseless age,
their masters killing invisible Indians, getting sleep.
Along the road we will ask for directions from lonely gas station men,
who will not have known the blessed smell of woman since TR's day.
I may be old but the lessons I know in bending low will serve us well.

On certain midsummer days the blue sky and brown earth meet
at a distant point close enough to touch with the reach of the hand.

copyright 2006 Anis Shivani
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