Blackwater Fever
They didn't find it in me until months later—
just like Vallejo who died on a rainy
day far from the heat rising over a garden
in silvers and reds—far away from the din
of buses, tobacco vendors, cows that overran
the streets with their holiness. Laid on the surface
of the Ganges, the thin shells reflected light, clamored
against the current. Far from the Atlantic, farther still
from the Potomac. Same color of night, dull dawn.
The fever should have churned my blood into tight
fists while the sunset stretched across the sky
like an open mouth. Everything was splintered heat.
I'd awake to winter in D.C., find streets covered
in snow, the words of some ancient language blooming
under my ankles like a song, a mantra called home.
I could trace it like a geography of someone I had once been.
How to explain the hum of mosquitos in my ear, sensual
and low, nothing like the sound of rusted-out engines,
police sirens, a train's whistle. How easily I'd lost the taste
for that water, opened my legs to their hot, biting mouths.
Vandana Khanna, "Blackwater Fever" from Train to Agra. Copyright © 2001 by Vandana Khanna. Reprinted by permission of Southern Illinois University Press.
Source:
Train to Agra
(Southern Illinois University Press, 2001)