"To India, Notebooks."
I lay on a towel beneath the snapping trees.
A thick copper branch fell near my face.
I was lying on my back in the snow,
my notebook balanced next to me on a crust of ice like a wolf,
like a lion, like a cobra, like a tiger, like a schizophrenic.
Schizophrenic.
What binds design?
What makes the city touch itself everywhere at once
like an Asian city, like the city you live in now?
What makes the wall wet, the step wet, the sky wet,
all disgusting?
An account began mid-ocean in a storm.
I went to Vimhans in New Delhi, poking holes
with my umbrella in the shimmering air.
Beyond the hospital's waiting room,
art galleries exploded, crumpled, and were recollected,
bags of dust.
I was visiting a person with a head injury.
A bulky cloud of soot came out of her mouth when she spoke.
Who's that?
I was visiting a person who needed medicine.
She needed a mask.
I went to the Institute of Community Health Sciences
in London to interview Kamaldeep Bhui getting
as far as his door.
I pressed my forehead to the door, which was crosshatched.
I could see his radio, his books, his clutter.
Similarly, in dim hands, in the corridor,
I saw a Muslim man on the stretcher propped up
against a wall, something vertical when it should have
been sideways, his wife with his head in her hands,
cupping the bones, the delicate lace of his white cotton
cap embroidered with tiny branching vines.
In the pharmacy, I met an exhausted woman
whose daughter had been hospitalized for a phobia.
When the spoon touched her lips, she had the terrible sensation
that it was slipping down her throat.
Her condition worsened if anything touched her sari.
If one of her children brushed against her thigh,
she felt a peristaltic reflex.
She felt she was swallowing them too.
Waiting to interview the researcher, a doctor
specializing in migration and mental illness,
I drifted to the end of the corridor
on the freezing silver day that had
penetrated even the university.
Looking down, I saw the red rooftops of the east end
stretch out in a crenallate and then I went home.
I documented the corridor, then went home.
What kind of person goes home?
It was a few days before Christmas Eve.
That December, I lived with my uncle, a mailman,
and aunt, a social worker, in a place called Pinner
a place analogous to Queens.
Reverse migration is psychotic.
I wake up in Delhi, for example, focusing upon the freshly dyed
black wool hanging from a line in the garden and dripping,
observed, through the netting of the door.
The door, the net, the grid, the garden
with its triptych of fuchsia, green, and black,
complicated zigzag stems.
The green light of the corridor bounces off
the walls, which are made of a near-transparent tent material.
I stare at a 12th century Vishnu on the postcard tucked
into my book, which I have slipped out, waiting,
posed, Vijayanagar- style on raw silk from China, Kashmir,
Afghanistan, and Bengal.
At least, these are my notes from the gallery
where I wrote, simmering in a pink shirt
and hurt, avoiding Vimhans with its pharmacy,
its occult and efficient medicines that
come in bottles as they do here, where I live now,
adhering to a good, orderly direction,
as if that will make it stop, make the green world stop.