Where we came from

Kolea BirdHalf a second from wingbeatto wingbeat,two days and two nightsabove the giant desert of water,three thousand milesfrom Alaska to Hawaii..Across Hilo Baythe first stars rise. Constellationsassume their wandering station.Orbit by orbit, season by season:perfection past tongue and feather..You may think you recognizethis tyranny:to pause once is to forsakethe garland of arrival —hibiscus unfolding dawnward,trumpet flowers stooping to kissthe rare earth..***Monsoon in ManhattanOne a.m. I lurch from the sushi barto the sidewalk. The city,I'm reliably informed, never sleeps,but the cabbies are ignoringthis axiom tonight..With too far to walkI start anyway. Seven blocks pass beforeTalwar Singh, turbaned angelof Panipat and Ace Taxi Service,sputters to the rescue..He wouldn't do this for any Tomor Mary, he tells the rear-view mirror.The wife's raising hell on the mobileand the direction's awkward,but what to do, no desican be abandoned to the hour—.even if he isn't Punjabi.The beard pivots. An appraisalis made. Tamil Nadu, Kerala?I tell him, but it hardly matters.The miracle of this citybeyond the black water:we are Indians at last..Geography vanquished,we turn to religion.How about that Glen McGrath?A god, but then, they're allpretty close to heaven down under.Something to dowith the ozone layer..The eternal question is rehearsed.Why can't a billion peopleproduce a single fast bowler? Fastas in kiss-your-gonads-goodbye fast.We know the answers: too many vegetarians,too much democracy..Our wheels kiss Brooklyn bridge, and nowa battered disc is chosen.The speakers crackle alive with a songthat is an invocation:for rivers to multiply and wells to climbacross a land on fire,for the smell of rainon parched earth..Talwar joins his voiceto the car stereo, and thenI join my voice to his. A cloudof celebration tumbles from the windowsto tremble over East River.We learn the world once.The rest is practise..***.Origins.Of all things man is the measure: of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not.—Protagoras, Refutations.5 a.m. It feels like ten.Jetlagged awake, I quit the lodgeand stumble to the forest's margin.for a cigarette. A smudgeof yellow widens in the East.The hills take body. Here our new.inventions: language, cross and wheelseem superfluous. It's easy toimagine some ancestral eye.enclose my vigil in its own.I squat and listen, fire in handfor the strident birds of dawn.to wake the antecedent jungle:slaughterhouse and nursery,no measuring stick on land or wateroblivion in the canopy..***.Metamorphoses.It will happen on a page of Euclid,just before the final tangent is drawnor the crucial angle bisected:a heartbeat where the fog dissolvesand the grand contour of the QEDlooms into view..Of late a book of photographshas played catalyst,as I race past Cuzco and Oxford(pausing to admire the full head of hairthat shielded me from the Toronto snow),to stumble on a deeper trigger:.some elder print whose gray and white reductionfills my head with the scent of bougainvillea,dresses me in kurta and jeansand sends me meandering through that dimensionless Delhithat I wear on my wrist like a rakhi..How the universe shifts gear then.How lucid seem the tracks of time and city,how amplified the drums of the soul..***.Nehru Park.My hawk-eyed daughter spots a kitetrapped in a tree. With loud delightshe rockets up and tugs it down..I can't retrieve a fitting nounto state her state; suffice to sayit's decades since I felt that way..I can't complain. Although I'm throughwith weightlessness, it's also trueI haven't wept beyond repair.in half a lifetime, haven't stoodin that same murderous despairas when my toys of clay and wood.lay cracked beneath an ayah's heel.My daughter says it's no big dealthe kite is torn – a lick of glueand it will be as good as new..~ Shekhar Aiyar was born in India and educated at Delhi, Oxford and Brown Universities. His work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Able Muse, Formalist, New Formalist, Avatar Review, and other journals in England, Sri Lanka and Canada. His first collection of poems, Continental Drift, was published by the Writer's Workshop, Calcutta. He lives in Washington, DC.