Poem Eight

After some delay
Here's poem eight
Let me know what you think.
Thanks.

MADURAI

Through grit
of blurred absolutes,

through moonlit soot settled
on certain Western eyes,
barnacled in stucco deities,

the temple-complex towers at Madurai become
Mars’ Notre Dame shaken upside-down and dipped
in impossible paints,

a thousand of the most forgotten, flat Earth
dropped-off Catholic saints, heads
sucked through their own stigmata, emerging

movie monster-hued in gargoyle asanas.
A scimitar for each new arm,
their eyes cross in that trembling, petrified

gratitude usually reserved for
just-seduced fourteen year old boys,
or resurrected lard rolling in mud.

Tonight their tongues blister asterisks, throb
insomnia, still blue
wary of the food, and wary

of the moonlight’s intentions
for the Golden Lotus Tank
where actual gods

once tossed to judge
by a simple floating test the poems
of the Tamil Sangam.

And where the sunken,
failed verses still disintegrate rejection
molecular, eternal.

Lotus-shaped on the map, this town
attaches smoke roots to the sagging sky’s
bottom swirl

of bats, the saints’
newly Hindu ears hearing even
sonar as mantra.

The bats’ low swooping taunts a patchy mutt
into an ever-constricting-circles
limping of her own hunger

that eventually twinges
dark-distressed ripples
every angle and alley of Madurai.

No dropped chapatti, not one thrown chapatti, no handful of rice.

By morning the town’s invisible
white jeweled heart
will have diffused in a murky sputter’s mud-shot mist,

a new obscurity
slurring up the intersections
in charred hair tangles.

Even the traffic wardens
softened and torn, black
straw, food for bulls.