POET, WHO CAN’T HELP BUT INTERJECT. RIVER, WHO STEALS MY WORDS

Still as jungle as when you left, the water wraps around your waist. Between the coniferous lean of your thighs. Flowing around the grief galore just below your core. Churned from the birdsong in eagle-hatch season pecking at your belly since you left.

 

I skipped the part where you exited—first time—jungle. The encroaching part of any city wall. The palace grounds, their pretend jungle. The princes at archery practice. The way they looked you down as they concentrated on their targets. Your approach at the guru, your ask, the princes’ faces, his refusal, the princes’ faces. The second—much smaller—ask you found
a way to muster.

 

I don’t want that single blessing from Drona to be what keeps you afloat. And this not-wanting is a quicksand, a form of drowning. As you submerge in the river, whatever keeps you from drowning must be something other than not-want. Whenever it’s me in a river like that, I wish I could allow the sharp to climb out through my skin, the perfect sheath of water caress softening the consonants of me into a vowel.

 

Often, I wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for another want I couldn’t ask, a want I’m afraid to name. And, who begs for a teacher they know they can make by hand themselves? Many, perhaps most. I have, for sure. There’s an elephant plate from my days at school in India, waiting for me to figure out how to seek the lessons I placed into it. Want or not: adjust, Ekalavya, Drona never says while nudging at your stance, adjust your stance this way. I mean, he turned you away. I’m not sure that he should be the guru your name alludes to. Not all the meanings address anyone but you.

 

It is weeks before you garland the Drona statue you will carve over the next few weeks. You are yet to sculpt the lips, lips—you must believe?—will impart a language of archery. A question I ask the clay while you submerge again. Only you can make the clay speak in your guru’s place, I say, and the clay does not respond. Somehow in this eddy of a moment, you will find the thing you love: inside you, all around, neither Drona nor I is close enough to tell you which.

 

Emerging from the water like a dolphin—though there aren’t any in your river—you look up, squint-stare at sky, tilt your head to the riffle just beyond this pool, cast your eyes down closer, down at your own multi-flourishing reflection. Junglee as you ever were. I smile the word to empty it of my father’s chiding.

 

Beneath your reflection, the clay, river-held for now. Dancing with the junctions of moon- face on the water-face, the statue’s future image crossfades in from yours: now, bearded as Drona’s: hair swept, bunned ascetic: beads to distinguish a guru’s neck. Perhaps, to you, he floats. Toward the shore of your body’s realization: a teacher seated lotus, left backhand resting at knee, fingers gyan mudra. And—like mine, as I breathe into it to describe—other palm cupped and reaching out to touch your chest.

 

All of this vibrates with the tone of soon. Ripples emanating in a circle are a labyrinth. For now, you dip for the first time, toes into the silt, then surface, torso glistening as a lie, a dripping lamentation. Your dream enfolds upon the shore. Pelt, half quiver, blade, bow: distant, small. Shaded from the sun, unproud. How guruless you are gulps at your open mouth.