Riverside Scene
Varanasi, India, 2014
Furious, a black goat harries in constricting circles
a stray and yapping pup. Bowed, the kid leads with its horns
round and round over a bed of cobbles
between the gleam of the Ganges and the pyre’s flames.
A human skull reveals by degrees
amid the marigolds of its burning
and from the immolated eyes run tears of fat.
The boiling air tastes of hickory. Pork. Grains of soot.
Nearby, aside an unlit pyre, a man
grips the foot of a shadow draped in cloth
lying in wait on a lattice of sweet-smelling sticks.
The goat charges round. The pup shimmies away, barking,
ever out of reach. They turn in unison on the riverbank
as the sacred waters flow by in the sunlight.
.
Horse Racing in Ranipauwa
I remember the gallop of the horses’ hooves
pounding in sets of eight again and again
up a lane of bare and thundered dirt,
and the taste of the drifting dust
whispered in with the sweetness
of the apple brandy
in a great glass jug being passed
among the watchers on the sidelines.
And I remember how all the villagers there held hands
but in my hands
were a notebook and stub of pencil, and when
I craned my face backward
to gaze north over the smiling crowds
I could see in the distance the rumor of Tibet:
faraway, faint and faded
across that soaring blue horizon
like some palimpsest fresco
upon the ancient temple of the sky.
How beautiful the horses
as they strained and ran,
and the horsemen
in their seething garbs of silk;
how fine the swift resonance of the hoofbeats
through the soles of my feet;
how palpable then the vacuum
of your absence at my side.
© M.P. Strayer
M.P. Strayer‘s work has appeared in numerous publications, most recently Black Sheep: Unique Tales of Terror and Wonder, The Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles, and Aethlon: the Journal of Sports Literature. He resides in Corvallis, Oregon, and can be reached at mpstrayerauthor@gmail.com.
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