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Alone, unfriended, on a foreign shore, Behold an hapless, melancholy maid, Begging her scanty fare from door to door, With piteous voice, and humbly bended head. Alas! her native tongue is known to few: Her manners and her garb excite suprise; The vulgar stare to see her bid adieu; Her tattered garments fix their curious eyes. Cease, cease your laugh, ye thoughtless vain; Why sneer at yon poor Indian’s pain? ’Tis nature’s artless voice that speaks: Behold the tear bedew her cheeks! Imploring actions, bursting sighs, Reveal enough to British eyes.

By nature Indians are very lazy and sworn enemies of work. They prefer to suffer hunger than to fatigue themselves with agriculture. Therefore, they must be forced to do this by their superiors. With six industrious Europeans one can do more in one day than fifty Indians —Joseph Och , Missionary in Sonora: Travel Reports of Joseph Och, S.J., 1755-1767 Mining: The Indian is naked, swinging quarter to half hundredweight steel-edged crowbars. He climbs beams with notches set step by step, carrying ore in plaited baskets on his shoulders. They are given one half-bushel of maize per week. This is their payment unless they have a family– then they are given two half-bushels. Two men using a wheelbarrow could haul out more than can thirty lazy Indians working an entire day.

Why does Mama wear Indira’s red and green earrings? A jinx is the inverse of Jewish artichoke; kinship is the transverse of no opinion coke. Flambé is the reverse of Papa’s poker chips; touché to the universe of acquiescent lips. For the same reason she wears silent Nehru jacket, holy Nehru jacket.

Colin, why this mistake? Why plead thy foolish love? My heart shall sooner break Than I a minion prove; Nor care I half a rush, No snare I spread for thee: Go home, my friend, and blush For love and liberty. Remembrance is my own — Dominion bright and clear, Truth there was ever known To combat every care: One image there impressed Through life shall ever be Whilst my innocuous breast Owns love of liberty. I ever taught thee how To prize the soul entire, When on the mountain’s brow I turned my rural lyre: Thou servile art and vain, Thy love unworthy me! Away! nor hear my strain, Of love or liberty. What arts need I display To woo a soul like thine? Thou ne’re canst know the way My memory to confine; For my eternal plan Is to be calm and free. Estranged from tyrant man I’ll keep my liberty. Yon woods their foliage wear, Be thou away or nigh; The warblers of the year Instruct me not to sigh: My tears ne’er roll the steep, Nor swell the restless sea, Except for those who sleep Bereft of liberty. Slave to commanding eyes! Those eyes thou wouldst commend My judgment must despise — My pity is thy friend: If eyes alone can move A swain so dull as thee, They mean but to reprove Thy loss of liberty. I stray o’er rocks and fields Where native beauties shine: All fettered fancy yields Be, Colin, ever thine. Complain no more! but rove — My cheek from crimson free, Within my native grove I’ll guard my liberty.

I can love both fair and brown, Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays, Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays, Her whom the country formed, and whom the town, Her who believes, and her who tries, Her who still weeps with spongy eyes, And her who is dry cork, and never cries; I can love her, and her, and you, and you, I can love any, so she be not true. Will no other vice content you? Will it not serve your turn to do as did your mothers? Or have you all old vices spent, and now would find out others? Or doth a fear that men are true torment you? O we are not, be not you so; Let me, and do you, twenty know. Rob me, but bind me not, and let me go. Must I, who came to travail thorough you, Grow your fixed subject, because you are true? Venus heard me sigh this song, And by love's sweetest part, variety, she swore, She heard not this till now; and that it should be so no more. She went, examined, and returned ere long, And said, Alas! some two or three Poor heretics in love there be, Which think to ’stablish dangerous constancy. But I have told them, Since you will be true, You shall be true to them who are false to you.

Indigenous Elvis works security: Chief Joseph hair, blue-black and pomped, turquoise and shell dangling from one ear, silver chunks of rings on every bronze knuckle. Indigenous Elvis works security: X-ray glances at your backpacks, laptops, empty still-moist shoes. Indigenous Elvis waves me to his line. A perfect gentlemen at all times, gingerly lifting my naked phone, holding the line as I return my computer and extra undies to my briefcase. Next line, next flight, Indigenous Elvis eases in too close, asks, "Where you headed this time?" Subtle tango, I lean away, wondering what it is he saw first gave me away— My beaded barrettes in their travel case? A slight turn to my eyes? Oh, mortification when I get him! Indigenous Elvis, at security, a third time. He lifts my carry-on, maneuvers my hand, gestures me close to ask, "How is my sweetheart?" Then against my neck, so my hairs rise with his sight, "How’s my sweetheart doing … your sister … ? ... the one that got away."

Benegal, 1779-1859 The fields flame with it, endless, blue as cobra poison. It has entered our blood and pulses up our veins like night. There is no other color. The planter’s whip splits open the flesh of our faces, a blue liquid light trickles through the fingers. Blue dyes the lungs when we breathe. Only the obstinate eyes refuse to forget where once the rice parted the earth’s moist skin and pushed up reed by reed, green, then rippled gold like the Arhiyal’s waves. Stitched into our eyelids, the broken dark, the torches of the planter’s men, fire walling like a tidal wave over our huts, ripe charred grain that smelled like flesh. And the wind screaming in the voices of women dragged to the plantation, feet, hair, torn breasts. In the worksheds, we dip our hands, their violent forever blue, in the dye, pack it in great embossed chests for the East India Company. Our ankles gleam thin blue from the chains. After that night many of the women killed themselves. Drowning was the easiest. Sometimes the Arhiyal gave us back the naked, swollen bodies, the faces eaten by fish. We hold on to red, the color of their saris, the marriage mark on their foreheads, we hold it carefully inside our blue skulls, like a man in the cold Paush night holds in his cupped palms a spark, its welcome scorch, feeds it his foggy breath till he can set it down in the right place, to blaze up and burst like the hot heart of a star over the whole horizon, a burning so beautiful you want it to never end. Note Paush: name of a winter month in the Bengali calendar The planting of indigo was forced on the farmers of Bengal, India, by the British, who exported it as a cash crop for almost a hundred years until the peasant uprising of I860, when the plantations were destroyed.

d

Foreplay of obscene graffiti carved into trees—foot-long boners gouge the bark. Beaks and snouts on a restroom mirror. Slick lips. Succulent lips. I go out among them sometimes. So sweet how they pucker up out of pity. A practiced pathos in a saloon of woodsmen whose axes wait in trucks out back. Lips full of yawn or yes. Lips thick with God-spit and God-suck. Chapped lips, bloody lips. Pierced or tattooed, they pout into view—here to give, willy-nilly, what's been too long held in the body. Something passes across tongues. It sayeth not a name; it taketh everyone's turn. Mute lips of a swift unbuttoner. Mouths fording frothy streams, vaporous bogs. I stumble forth in their midst. Maybe I am out of bread or in a bad place with a book. The streets have an attendant caress. Moon lapping rumor. Fat lip approaches hare lip. There go pasty lips. All are readied as if for a race or to be plucked like rare moths by bright wings from the air. Betty's lips and Bobby's and Bucky's just before the collision and the siren's red wail. Laddy, keep a light on. I may have to come ashore some distance from where I set in.

It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven hoists his death-mask and sails off. The grindstones are turning in Europe’s windmills. The wild geese are flying northwards. Here is the north, here is Stockholm swimming palaces and hovels. The logs in the royal fireplace collapse from Attention to At Ease. Peace prevails, vaccine and potatoes, but the city wells breathe heavily. Privy barrels in sedan chairs like paschas are carried by night over the North Bridge. The cobblestones make them stagger mamselles loafers gentlemen. Implacably still, the sign-board with the smoking blackamoor. So many islands, so much rowing with invisible oars against the current! The channels open up, April May and sweet honey dribbling June. The heat reaches islands far out. The village doors are open, except one. The snake-clock’s pointer licks the silence. The rock slopes glow with geology’s patience. It happened like this, or almost. It is an obscure family tale about Erik, done down by a curse disabled by a bullet through the soul. He went to town, met an enemy and sailed home sick and grey. Keeps to his bed all that summer. The tools on the wall are in mourning. He lies awake, hears the woolly flutter of night moths, his moonlight comrades. His strength ebbs out, he pushes in vain against the iron-bound tomorrow. And the God of the depths cries out of the depths ‘Deliver me! Deliver yourself!’ All the surface action turns inwards. He’s taken apart, put together. The wind rises and the wild rose bushes catch on the fleeing light. The future opens, he looks into the self-rotating kaleidoscope sees indistinct fluttering faces family faces not yet born. By mistake his gaze strikes me as I walk around here in Washington among grandiose houses where only every second column bears weight. White buildings in crematorium style where the dream of the poor turns to ash. The gentle downward slope gets steeper and imperceptibly becomes an abyss.