Cautionary tales: After Kabir

I.

Beware, my sons, of towns founded by gold-miners,
now abandoned in the saddle of a valley.
Before long, parting ways with your muleteers,
you´ll stumble on routes
no caravan has used for decades.

Stone monkeys point north to the foothills.
Below spread pastures flecked with ash, outposts
snuffed out by crossed signals, crooked guides.
Those who reach this town have taken
the wrong direction, been taken  for a ride.

And come here without risking their necks
on the slopes, without seeing that other country
of high passes which do not clear,
where the mist hovers, a wry hawk.
Who talks of that other country

misses the point.

II.

Beware, my daughters, of men who say:
I´ve forgotten the name of my village,
I´ve forgotten the way back;
tomorrow,  cross the river
in an iron canoe .
with rocks for ballast.

Starving pioneers, prospectors duped
by brindled stream and hacksaw ledge,
may the swooping hawk
wish them well.

III.

A splinter from the fair tree of that other country
once lodged deep in my thigh. I´ve carried
that broken spear-point around for years.
Fetch me, from the mines of that other country,
a lodestone to pull it out.

Fronds of fire above, roots winched
in the running transparence of a brook:
homage to that phoenix, the fair tree of that other country,
on which the image is about to flower.

IV.

Broken staircase. Blue lotus afloat
on the surface of imagined water.
My words are pinpoints,
spots of light shot though the wormholes
in the pages of my grandfather´s journals.
My words are foxes gone to ground
in the maze of his cellared notes.

The man who wrote those testaments
didn´t notice when his pen fell back,
slow-paced turtle to the hare of his song.
His speech, like mine, was eastern:
if you were quicker, you´d catch his words
before they melted on my tongue
and trapped us in writing once again.

Hunt on, coroner of rhymes, among library shelves
in the west, where no one follows us
except the anthologists of curious dialects.