WEBVTT

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"To India, Notebooks."

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I lay on a towel beneath
the snapping trees.

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A thick copper branch
fell near my face.

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I was lying on my
back in the snow,

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my notebook balanced next to me
on a crust of ice like a wolf,

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like a lion, like a cobra, like
a tiger, like a schizophrenic.

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Schizophrenic.

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What binds design?

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What makes the city touch
itself everywhere at once

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like an Asian city, like
the city you live in now?

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What makes the wall wet,
the step wet, the sky wet,

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all disgusting?

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An account began
mid-ocean in a storm.

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I went to Vimhans in
New Delhi, poking holes

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with my umbrella in
the shimmering air.

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Beyond the hospital's
waiting room,

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art galleries exploded,
crumpled, and were recollected,

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bags of dust.

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I was visiting a person
with a head injury.

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A bulky cloud of soot came out
of her mouth when she spoke.

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Who's that?

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I was visiting a person
who needed medicine.

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She needed a mask.

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I went to the Institute of
Community Health Sciences

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in London to interview
Kamaldeep Bhui getting

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as far as his door.

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I pressed my forehead to the
door, which was crosshatched.

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I could see his radio,
his books, his clutter.

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Similarly, in dim
hands, in the corridor,

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I saw a Muslim man on
the stretcher propped up

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against a wall, something
vertical when it should have

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been sideways, his wife
with his head in her hands,

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cupping the bones, the delicate
lace of his white cotton

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cap embroidered with
tiny branching vines.

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In the pharmacy, I
met an exhausted woman

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whose daughter had been
hospitalized for a phobia.

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When the spoon touched her lips,
she had the terrible sensation

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that it was slipping
down her throat.

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Her condition worsened if
anything touched her sari.

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If one of her children
brushed against her thigh,

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she felt a peristaltic reflex.

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She felt she was
swallowing them too.

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Waiting to interview
the researcher, a doctor

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specializing in migration
and mental illness,

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I drifted to the
end of the corridor

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on the freezing
silver day that had

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penetrated even the university.

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Looking down, I saw the red
rooftops of the east end

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stretch out in a crenallate
and then I went home.

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I documented the
corridor, then went home.

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What kind of person goes home?

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It was a few days
before Christmas Eve.

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That December, I lived
with my uncle, a mailman,

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and aunt, a social worker,
in a place called Pinner

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a place analogous to Queens.

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Reverse migration is psychotic.

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I wake up in Delhi, for example,
focusing upon the freshly dyed

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black wool hanging from a line
in the garden and dripping,

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observed, through the
netting of the door.

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The door, the net,
the grid, the garden

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with its triptych of
fuchsia, green, and black,

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complicated zigzag stems.

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The green light of the
corridor bounces off

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the walls, which are made of a
near-transparent tent material.

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I stare at a 12th century
Vishnu on the postcard tucked

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into my book, which I
have slipped out, waiting,

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posed, Vijayanagar- style on
raw silk from China, Kashmir,

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Afghanistan, and Bengal.

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At least, these are my
notes from the gallery

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where I wrote, simmering
in a pink shirt

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and hurt, avoiding
Vimhans with its pharmacy,

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its occult and
efficient medicines that

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come in bottles as they
do here, where I live now,

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adhering to a good,
orderly direction,

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as if that will make it stop,
make the green world stop.

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