He will lie on a wide, embroidered bed

with painted deities breathing faintly on the walls.

Beyond the door, a cloudless sky. Bursting

as it does here, to the limit of belief.

Adoring family will press on all sides.

His renunciates — orange and black koi—

will ebb nearby in unseen streams.

I will be there, under some auspices.

Having prayed hard enough, perhaps

wordless at last.

He will laugh. Let slip a peerless joke to pull us closer,

fill the life raft with tears.

Love more than death.

Always His way.

Then, with eyelids heavy in a soundless conjunction,

His right hand will fall open.

Incense ash tipping over in a bowl of sand.

It’s 5:05 p.m. here.

Where it all did happen, a year ago to the second

and not at all according to plan.

My brother and I lie face down

on a freshly cut lawn. Our fingertips

point to a chair gilded in silks.

Men wail through conches.

Women thrash their cymbals.

We sit back on our knees.

Offer ti leaves up to the sky.

Both hands cupped like bowls

here at the doorstep of His studio

where I’ve come for the first time ever.

Not forgetting for a moment the lives

and the blood it took to get me here.

I look my Lord in the eye

and thank Him

like a man on the gallows,

like every time before. The sun flares

behind a quilt of coal-black clouds. [KF10]

A Bengali woman sings alone.

Without string or drum.

[KF11] Her organ cuts the fine stream of rain

that falls on all that gathers here.

The drizzle paints our hands and faces white.

No one moves.

In this plot where He fell.

Where He clutched His heart.

Poised.

And leapt through time,

into all the waiting rain.