Across the road, mustard-stalks lie heaped in meadows
and pear-groves.
The eye is used to this now, the fields layered
with water
and mountains axing down two thousand feet deep
across the wet sheath.
The eyes drugged with willow and waterscape
can take
no more. You notice things only when you climb
the hill. The skyline
hugs the valley from root to mouth
and from the south
to its northern tip, a sense of space, the sight
of terraced water mixed with murky light.

The serpent-waters unwinding from their coils
hiss in turmoil
down the flagstones. Nothing's bluer, not ether, not comet-fires
nor crystal nor sapphire;
no speculum of a mineral-coloured bird
is so intense. This blue dot is the word
in its womb-chamber. The fugitive waters swirl
from the underworld
and course through: a dark solitary truth
that creases a valley
with its silt and vivifies a landscape, a nation.
Even the air above it becomes a blue vibration.

They came here, like shepherds across the snows,
perhaps with chilblained toes;
they came in the summer-thirst of their passions,
Parvati and Shiva.
She asked for water, and when he found none
he struck the mountain
in the hot noon of his anger, and the snout
appeared. The blue foam jetted out.

I too struck home and the waters of your body
rose to engulf me.
We came here in the late summer of our love,
the sky above
blue and benign. Your hair trailed over my face and pieced
together the bruised
bits of my being. No rheumatic heart ailed me,
but the soul's gout.
The light from your eyes
phased the darkness out.
The gods are dead, but the river flows, ever-changing
yet changeless,
as it flowed at the first dawn of love.

Banal questions come on a turgid wind
and cross the mind.
Is this flow the serpent-power in the spine?
Is it time
coursing heedless of the wayside dead?
Is it the bullet-head
of the shivaling joining infinity
with eternity,
spiking the underworld with the world above?

For me it is your thirst-killing, thirst-renewing passions
flowing from under the rock of your love.