Holding you is like holding water.
Krishna, in the Bhagavad-gita, defines kama as a fire that engulfs each of the body’s senses.
Ka: to desire
Ma: to create.
Last week, I walked across a bridge and stopped by a bundle of worms flowering in the grass after rain. They looked blue vermicellied under the noon sun. Wind whipped against the spirals on their shoestring bodies. I wondered if it is true — if cutting a worm in half will create a new worm, a third creature, othered from the worm, from my hands — a spindle of summer ash blown out like molten glass into the air.
To engulf is to destroy.
Thomas Aquinas revealed four ways to overcome lust. The fourth? Just keep busy.
Somewhere, a switchblade kisses a thorax. A hand, lonely as a hyoid bone, scaffolds an arm. Voice: an arroyo. Water: missing child. A mouth tears a piece of raw liver, the frozen blood like red glaciers on the alps of your ribcage. Where is the animal? His faceless voice asks.
Parasmani Devi was the last lover of the black laughing Lord of the Universe. She danced in the Balisahi of the Jagannath Mandir before Garuda, the gold bird carrier of Vishnu. She would lullaby the deities to sleep with songs of divine lust from the vault of Jayadev Gosvami: the Gita-govinda.
vasati vipina-vitāne tyajati lalita-dhāma || luṭhati dharaṇi-śayane bahu vilapati tava nāma || tava virahe…
Renouncing his marble palace of sapphires that could rival moonshine, Krishna now resides in the depths of the forest, where no light reaches. || He thrashes on a bed of dirt and stones, hollering your name — Radha — over and over. || This separation from you…
I am not trying to remain in illusion. I accept myself as a small creature, a turtle perhaps, trying to crawl through tangerine riverlight. The day has worn a robe of silence. Outside, the sky canaries through the seasons. A ticking clock echoes through my bones.
Shiva, the Immortal Lord of Dance, the Lord of Serpents and Skulls, the Supreme Ash-Smeared God, the Blue Tombstone Below Kali’s Soles, I offer you my obeisance.
Shiva, anger lengthening through his eyes, beheaded and cindered the head of Kamadeva, the god of lust.
The small god teetered in the cold galaxy like the skeleton of a star.
Lord, I am frothing at the mouth. Poison has possessed my belly. My lungs are a screen of smoke and bile. I am left songless, as naked as a torched temple, as a ghost among believers. Dispel my doom. Or behead me, too.
Holding you is like holding water. Where are you in the desert? Where is Yamuna in the Thar? I see swirls of flares in the distant horizon. My crown of solitude. My dark stone. My blood churns to lava. The ocean is a rumour, a tide whispering somewhere around here. Tell me the truth, beloved. When will you come back?
Where are you now?
Holding you is like drinking water.
Holding you is like watering the arid ginger threads of the cracked and beaten earth of July.
Even with a stillborn, the woman becomes a mother.
Lover, hold her hand. Those fingers of water. She is as cool and round as rainfall rainbowed through sunlight.
Here, a sheaf of prayers. Here, a mala of your name. Here, the axe to scrape the sin from my limbs.
No man need forgive me.
I kiss azaleas. I kiss your feet. I live between burn and salve.
But the constant desert.
Rilke, that divine Aristotle, who in his infinite wisdom, said we only need love to soon never need love, was not kneeling like us.
Originally published here as one of the winners of the Palette Love & Eros Poetry Prize, selected by Carl Phillips