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The tide rises, the tide falls, The twilight darkens, the curlew calls; Along the sea-sands damp and brown The traveller hastens toward the town, And the tide rises, the tide falls. Darkness settles on roofs and walls, But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls; The little waves, with their soft, white hands, Efface the footprints in the sands, And the tide rises, the tide falls. The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls; The day returns, but nevermore Returns the traveller to the shore, And the tide rises, the tide falls.

O patient shore, that canst not go to meet Thy love, the restless sea, how comfortest Thou all thy loneliness? Art thou at rest, When, loosing his strong arms from round thy feet, He turns away? Know’st thou, however sweet That other shore may be, that to thy breast He must return? And when in sterner test He folds thee to a heart which does not beat, Wraps thee in ice, and gives no smile, no kiss, To break long wintry days, still dost thou miss Naught from thy trust? Still, wait, unfaltering, The higher, warmer waves which leap in spring? O sweet, wise shore, to be so satisfied! O heart, learn from the shore! Love has a tide!

You who see our homes at night and the frail walls of our conscience, you who hear our conversations droning on like sewing machines —save me, tear me from sleep, from amnesia. Why is childhood—oh, tinfoil treasures, oh, the rustling of lead, lovely and foreboding— our only origin, our only longing? Why is manhood, which takes the place of ripeness, an endless highway, Sahara yellow? After all, you know there are days when even thirst runs dry and prayer’s lips harden. Sometimes the sun’s coin dims and life shrinks so small that you could tuck it in the blue gloves of the Gypsy who predicts the future for seven generations back and then in some other little town in the south a charlatan decides to destroy you, me, and himself. You who see the whites of our eyes, you who hide like a bullfinch in the rowans, like a falcon in the clouds’ warm stockings —open the boxes full of song, open the blood that pulses in aortas of animals and stones, light lanterns in black gardens. Nameless, unseen, silent, save me from anesthesia, take me to Tierra del Fuego, take me where the rivers flow straight up, horizontal rivers flowing up and down.

Is it only when you’re little you know tigers live in your closet— one with your shoes on his two ears, another with your umbrella tied to his tail; the rest wearing your red coat and blue trousers with the red buttons? Is it only when you’re little the dustballs have mountainous shadows in the crack of light under the door? Or is it also NOW you fear that tigers will eat you— when you wake in the middle of the night and don’t know where you are, nor remember how far you’ve come. Your nose hurts like a plowed field, your fingers stiff— Then somehow, you remember what you’ve accomplished. The sewing is finished— The red buttons threaded to the blue pants and the little coat with its sleeves. And you know you have given them to the tigers (so they won’t eat you). But they chased themselves around a tree and melted into butter. NOW you can pick up your coat and trousers, your shoes and umbrella. Soon, even, you can start your car and go— The promise of dawn already on the face of the clock-radio.

When you put on the mask the thunder starts. Through the nostril’s orange you can smell the far hope of rain. Up in the Nilgiris, glisten of eucalyptus, drip of pine, spiders tumbling from their silver webs. The mask is raw and red as bark against your facebones. You finger the stripes ridged like weals out of your childhood. A wind is rising in the north, a scarlet light like a fire in the sky. When you look through the eyeholes it is like falling. Night gauzes you in black. You are blind as in the beginning of the world. Sniff. Seek the moon. After a while you will know that creased musky smell is rising from your skin. Once you locate the ears the drums begin. Your fur stiffens. A roar from the distant left, like monsoon water. You swivel your sightless head. Under your sheathed paw the ground shifts wet. What is that small wild sound sheltering in your skull against the circle that always closes in just before dawn? Note The poem refers to a ritual performed by some Rajasthani hill tribes to ensure rain and a good harvest.

We didn’t know my mother was driving back to her childhood, with a ring of keys, a compass, and a tiger panting in the back seat. Soon enough the tiger was behind the wheel, circling. And each circle spun further and further away from us. When she calls, the tiger has parked the yellow-striped taxi on the highway’s rough shoulder. It’s time, she says, for this dream to be over. Time to go home, sleep in her own bed. If the compass ever worked, she’s forgotten how to read it, and the ring for the keys is broken, the keys melted down for their metal. If I would just call someone and tell him where she is. She has money — she can pay someone to drive her home. If only a road sign were in sight, but no, there’s only scattered chert and farmland and a man across the road who is not my father. Behind the wheel the hungry tiger’s yellow eyes are slightly open. Behind the wheel the tiger snacks on the summer of 1970 and the entire works of Iris Murdoch. Caught in his teeth are recipes for chocolate mousse and coq au vin, my brother’s first arrest, the one- room schoolroom where her mother taught. So who to call? The tiger, sated for the nonce, has started snoring. The quick drive by, today disguised as children. The tiger snores away.

The Tiger-Woman came to me When dusk was close and men were dull. She beckoned from the jungle-path; I followed, dreaming, fanciful. The Tiger-Woman’s face is pale, But oh, her speaking eyes are dark. No beast can move so lithe as she Beside the matted river’s mark. The jungle is a fearsome place For men who hunt, and men who slay, But I was not afraid to go Where Tiger-Woman led the way. The Tiger-Woman’s lips are thin; Her teeth are like the Tiger’s teeth. Yet her soft hands are woman’s hands, And oh, the blood beats warm beneath. She led me to a little glade,— The creepers with the moon inwove,— And two great striped beasts leaped up And fawned upon her breast in love. The Tiger-Woman’s voice was sweet; I hearkened and was not afraid. She stroked the Tigers’ fearful jaws; Upon their heads my hands I laid. And all the jungle things drew near, And all the leaves a music made Like spirits chanting in a choir Along the bamboo colonnade. Too sweet for human harps to sound, It touched my blood, it fired my heart The Tiger-Woman sang, and I Sang too, and understood her art. She kissed the Tiger’s snarling mouth. She kissed—I marveled that she could— But now her lips were warm on mine; I cared not they were dabbed with blood. What if the traveller shuns my hut, What if the world forgets to be, What if I have the Tiger’s heart,— The Tiger-Woman loveth me!

Moringa of the flood bed on the banks of the river Tigris. A dove on a swaying bough's mournful cooing has turned me sad, Her song like the song of the queen of the gathering— When she touches her triple chord you can forget the maestro brother of the caliph al-Hádi! And when she sings!—who was Ánjash that camel driver with the mesmerizing chant, anyway? In Hadimát, Sálma's direction, and Sindád, I swear it, I'm in love, far gone, with a girl who lives in Ájyadi. Wrong, she lives in the obsidian black of the membrane of my liver. Through her, in a rush of musk and saffron, beauty falls into disarray.

Round and round they go with a ribbon and garlanded flowers in hand. The bark won't unravel, the tree spells solidness—we grand, oaken, elmed selves of the ancients. Our pith is clean. There's no pining away for tomorrow, we are in current respiration, we move with the wind. Singular, we are stunning. In horde, we are dense, differing dream. The autumnal flashiness these days is drought-determined. We barely go beyond the red. Our hollows are never vacant. We live to board; we take the ax. Marbled inside the original stem. We were born we don't know when.

I can’t tell you I had climbed for hours on ledges and crawled through gaps in the earth. My hands negotiating through the teeth of the palisade lipped under the vineyard of temperate skies. And I can’t tell you that I came onto a ledge within the shelter of a granite roof, ceaselessly carved by centuries of dripping water. Feeding from pooled water and singular sunlight a chamisa plant sat like a chopped wood. The opposite end of root speaking for its entirety through silence and color. And I wish I could tell you that at the moment I met its splitting scent under the enormity of stone your name appeared in my throat with clarity. And I wish we were old and in front of a grand painting, a picture or postcard of Picasso’s “Guernica” perhaps. It would be then that I would tell you Picasso once said that it took him his entire life to learn how to paint like a child. It would be through these words that would make you understand the same clarity that pooled over me on that ledge those years before when as a young man I extended like direction, like timbre itself for a dying song that echoed your name.