Silver cord: a zuihitsu

after a photo of my maternal great-grandparents’ family, 1956

Eleven lives
rewound seven decades.

I hold them within a frame
in poignant monochrome—
stories unspool in ink on silk,
in the regal assemblage
of youthful countenances.

*

Padmanabha.

In the creation myth,
a blue god reclines
on the coils of a divine serpent.

An ocean of milk bolsters his sleep.
In the primordial stillness,
he moulds a universe
and all its marvels
into being.

*

A bird of the eclipse comes to nest
bringing a hex of rain and darkness.
Everything wilts under the weight
of its mammoth wings.

*

Faces sing from the heirloom—
two deeply cherished,
three known in passing,
five held in the folds of lore.

*

Meenakshi.

She of the Piscean eyes
glides in the sacred water.
A Mother Fish
with the grace of a warrioress,
her resolve is pure,
sieving the sun through her fins
in the sea of watchfulness.

*

When I wake up, my limbs are a melange
of feathers and scales—a meld
of curious places and climes.
The cosmos of my birth
is now a collapsed dot.

*

Blueprints emerge at dawn.
A silver cord still binds me
to the nine auspicious gemstones
to the hazel zinnia of irises
to the power to master all earthly sorrow.

*

Time leaves tell-tale sediments.

Someday
my fragments might become whole,
a whorl of ancestral petals—
seeds from a bygone era
threaded within
like a rosary of souls.