The faceless child came down as weight, as tide,
the mattress cupping what it could not name;
she was no comfort, no familiar guide,
but terror breaking over all the same.
You lay transfixed; the dark a second skin
that pooled around her, smooth and polish-blind—
her face a shell the night kept closing in,
a blank that gave you nothing to divine.
You prayed for sleep to pull you from that shore,
to let the body loosen, drift, go slack;
instead, a too-large hand filled up the door
and scattered golden ash above the child’s back.
The dust fell once. The room did not protest.
By morning, only one of us was left.

I. Augury

As a child, I carried odd, prescient dreams—
small details: where a buried locket slept,
or some lost trinket hid itself in seams
of neighborhoods I’d wandered only in sleep.
No one cared much, not really, until I said
our dog would die beneath a freighted truck;
and then my father, startled, bowed his head.
From that night on, my family left luck
outside the door. We’d gather late, confer
in the living room—my “visions” guiding moves
or money, or anything that might occur
to grown-ups fearing consequence. They approved
my awkward teenage ramblings, granting weight
reserved for augurs dreaming out the state.

II. The Blonde

My guide came early—four years old, I think—
small, and dreadful. She had no eyes at all
and lived beneath the stairs, her lavender skin
turned always inward, studying the wall.
At night, The Blonde unraveled space for me,
dilated time, whispered sideways truths
my parents swore they heard when I’d half-flee
my bedroom—her words still clinging to my mouth.
But gifts grow thin. I see faint shapes now—slips
of futures drifting just beyond the frame;
and though she speaks, her voice arrives eclipse-
blurred, changing bodies, changing even her name
to meet me where I am. I try to hear,
but all her meanings scatter when they near.

A wave: a mountain, writ in smaller terms;
a breath: the substrate the clouds require.
A flame: what once was stellar, what confirms
how little heat remains of ancient fire.
A lie: the progenitor of truth.
A life: a congress of the devils’ schemes.
A death: the corpus of the same, uncouth
and plain, a record kept by what redeems.
What did Heraclitus say? We step
and are born again with every stride.
What did Schopenhauer dream? Ask sleep,
or Shiva burning, Vishnu set aside.
What did Giacometti see? A nose—
whatever you inferred, I meant it so.

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.

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.