San Domenico is my reliquary,
a temenos of bronze and marble—
the friars removed my head from my body
to suspend it like a thought in the altar.
I hear them chanting as they don their vestments
in the sacristy before evening Mass
and watch them in procession swinging incense,
bearing the Holy Eucharist as they pass.
Yet there is a secret I hold most dear:
no martyr died with grace or dignity,
for still my fellow prisoners peer
from the frescoes and the tapestries
with a passivity that mocks their pain;
each portrait a lie, the immurement of faith.

When I awoke, I beheld a symbol:
the night before, You channeled a whisper
from antiquity: some Roman trickster
slowly warmed his gladius over fire
then pointed north to Lucifer, his muse,
reversed the ancient order of the stars

turning his heel toward Saturn. Yet the stars
like sand had scattered beneath the symbol
before its perfect imprint formed the muse:
and there, in its symmetry, Your whisper
poured freely through a vestibule of fire.
And when I awoke, I knew the trickster

planted the images here; the trickster
caressed his gladius under the stars
and pressed his buckler inward to the fire.
Now I fully apprehend the symbol:
the burning mouth, its half-repeated whisper,
the sandal planted in the earth, a muse

scorching the hairs on our necks; the muse
singing antiquity with the trickster
reduced to broken embers, a whisper
now imbued with the blue ashes of stars.
I know it was You who loosed the symbol,
broke the axis as kindling to a fire

crushed Lucifer and therefore bore the fire
then cupped the light within Your palms—a muse
unto Yourself—who wrung the symbol
from the vestal heart, and turned the trickster
from his proving grounds. Now the twilight stars
align, Venus at the fore, a whisper

born of a sleeping Roman: a whisper
which rose behind the dancing veil of fire,
his crucible the song of evening stars.
You pointed north to Lucifer, our muse,
limned the constellations of the trickster
and charted the path of every symbol:

His cold sword: the symbol of a whisper;
The trickster’s hearth: vicissitudes of fire;
Our muse, his burning heel above the stars

At night, the shadow of a wolf descends
down the frozen shoulders of the forest
to settle by the window of this house—
I see her figure held within its frame
and she in turn watches me from the yard,
the shadow of a cross against her face

cast from my window on her face—
but when the smoke above the roof descends
it drifts past every corner of the yard
and pools below the edges of the forest
and spills beyond the limits of her frame
to turn her from the light beyond this house

to turn her as a secret from my house.
Yet she returns to gaze upon my face
on smokeless nights, to grace my window frame
and mark the moonlit grass when night descends,
singing with her brothers in the forest
whose chorus presses outward from the yard.

Beyond my bed, she beckons from the yard
her breath beneath the floorboards of this house
bearing winds that gather in the forest
now rising—unbidden—from my ankles to my face.
In dreams, the shadow of a wolf descends
slowly below my headboard to the frame

till I am frozen fast against the frame.
Her breath leaves frost, then vanishes in the yard,
her cobalt eyes recede, then she descends
the broken marble path behind the house
and leaps behind the fence’s northern face
to join her brothers deep in the forest

past the open shoulders of the forest.
I wake to see her near the window frame,
she peers from shadows cast across her face,
warms her winter body in the yard
and leaves her restless spirit in my house.
I praise her every night when she descends,

when her shadow turns to face the forest
and smoke descends below this window frame
to fill the yard, turning her from my house.

Light, the broken order;
Hate, the ancient wheel;
Death, the open water;
Birth, the shepherd’s seal.

Sleep, the augur’s gamble;
Love, the upturned nail;
Joy, the ringing anvil;
Lust, the tattered sail.

Pain, my master’s reason;
Age, the prophet’s dance;
Youth, the fickle season;
Faith, my lover’s hands

We move about Mylapore, the enjambment of streets—
where old buildings list, their shadows diminished—
and look for an edge where the pattern repeats.

Blue incense curls from the avatar’s feet,
its ribbons ascend to his hand like a wish;
we move about Mylapore, the enjambment of streets,

by the balustrade trunks where the elephants sleep;
their bodies remember what a temple forgets,
and dream at the end where the pattern repeats.

Colored shoes semaphore maṇḍapa’s heat,
as temple bags glimmer beneath garland nets;
we move about Mylapore, the enjambment of streets,

where worshippers shuffle their penitent feet,
never colliding, never amiss;
they walk toward the ledge where the pattern repeats.

Inside the shrine, novitiates sing,
and pandits obscure their order of bliss;
we move about Mylapore, the enjambment of streets,
and wait for the breath where the pattern repeats.

We meditate on the eve of my father’s death,
under the tutelage of Tetsuzen
under the aegis of syncretic faith,
under a cross in Campion Chapel.
Tetsuzen straightens my back with his palm
and stick, and my father sits up with me.
Tetsuzen angles my chin with his palm
and stick, my mother is looking with me.
But when he taps the singing bowl and chants
my spirits enter desolence—
your breath entrains with mine, our hands
enjoin in the same mudra, in silence:
there is no sacrament, no wine or bread,
and tonight even the koans are dead.

Entranced by the ersatz girl, an old man’s heart
wells upward into ecstasy. He stands—
a mast in unseen currents—a world apart,
blanched below the chalky night’s commands.
He floats below wisterias and willows,
their moonlit drapery pulling him along
toward her curious gaze. Her posture follows:
she bares her chest as if the wind were strong—
a child, a sacrifice of blind abandon,
she calls to him: the rocks are not your end.
The hillside, mute and stony, makes its summons
over the ones who falter, break, and bend.
He nears the edge; the dark would take him in.
She calls again—the rocks are a benediction.

They skim the sand at Berjaya in black,
not walking—moving as the tide permits,
their hems kept clean where surf withdraws and lacks
the reach to mark what passes over it.
“Come here.” The phrase is quiet, edged with use.
She drifts toward Bella, low-tide sure and slow—
her hand, inscribed with henna: scripture without truce;
her eyes—two blue instructions I can’t know.
The heat goes still. I hold my breath.
Her fingers near my daughter’s lifted hair.
Then something skims my calf—wood, a weed, a net
the sea has finished with—and settles there.
A hand held back, the air we didn’t break;
the body keeps the breath we didn’t take.

After the first collapse, the room grew wet.
Forms softened. Walls began to breathe you back.
Love taught you how to close around a threat,
how to invoke terror, keep it smooth, intact.
We could not cut the sickness to the bone—
it nested where the mouth learns how to seal.
Each breath became a vow you made to him;
each vow, a shape the body had to feel.
You made the mask obscene enough to hold:
all lips and chambers, dotted into trance,
a face that learned how beauty molds its own.
Your husband held you there, his maddening dance.
What burned was not the mind, but what we spare—
the mask’s wet hinge—where breath corrupts to prayer.

The river bears its witness under stone.
What gathers there refuses any face.
No psalm will lift it. Weather claims its own,
a pressure time can neither spend nor place.
In Iwate Prefecture, the phone weighs down the air.
You lift it. Something tightens in the wire.
No god steps in. No answer meets you there.
The mouth goes on, exacting its desire.
I call. I do not beg for my release.
I hold the strain where breath and metal bind—
the living hitched to what will never cease,
lover and poet breaking in the mind.
I speak into the form. It does not take.
No voice accepts the offering I make.