MINAL HAJRATWALA

(This feature is part of TRUCK’s Theme Issue on the List or Catalog Poem. You can go HERE for an Index of the Participating Poets.)

Force Hexagram (Six Unbroken Lines)

[Crossroads. Half-night. Enter six POETESSES

pouring libations. They throw the I Ching.]

1

What doesn’t break me makes me so I tried to tell the uncooked writer, pour in water, boil the daal, strain. See that deleted liquid? Such a waste but you can’t skip steps. We distill out lies before our words taste true.

4

They say his anger narcissized the world thrusting relentless “i”s before pods & pads we daily revere, touch-touch more than our lovers, genitalia, pets.

6

Told my body good luck before I swallowed.

3

“Push it, push it real good.”

2

Chöd (one people’s word for fuck is another’s alchemy): ritual to pour your body (“radical nectar”) into pure-sordid mouths of demons, also gods.

5

So answer her why earnestly as chlorophyll responds to radiant arcing queries of

our star.

The Seeker Advances to the Celestial Realm

No one told me, now I see

why they could not tell me

how it is here, after. For who could speak

of Chimpanzee Lust Buddha

swinging treetop to treetop

guzzling & nuzzling brown limbs, or explain

Ogre-Treasure Buddha baring adamantine teeth

trampling manifold worlds, rainbow feet

stained with every species’ blood? I watch them die

as the Buddha of Radiant Cannibalism

tingles with irreversible loss

in hys bosom, hys star-grazing claws,

& the Buddha of Red Veils absorbs aches

into hir arc’d back,

hir thunder-cracked spine,

while Rotten Nailpolish Buddha

chews & chews delusions

down to bleeding flesh of reality

& Moon-Chaste Buddha glows

earnest as cheese, chanting sutras

in dialects discovered between toes.

Which theology could document the twenty-one thousand

births & deaths of Phosphorous Buddha,

how zie led twenty-one billion beings into grace,

or how the Buddha of the Clear Path Mind

eats dustberries, pure

puffs exhaled by none other than

the Buddha of Gaseous Winds

who swallows fragments of stars to fill xirself

with stinking orange-green light?

No wonder back then

in ordinary time

they tell us just one story:

how Shakyamuni awakened

at a scrubbed sunrise

under the bright clean boughs of the pipal tree.

O most compassionate Buddhas, which one of you shall guide

this newbie through pink crusts of enlightenment

on the dungheap of nirvana

as I stand here trembling

before the Buddha of Gnawed Syllables

naked of my skin, ready for my final name?

___________

Both poems originally published in Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment by Minal Hajratwala, The (Great) IndianPoetry Collective, 2014.