Fingerprints of Rain

(for Jeet Thayil and his ‘Book of Chocolate Saints’)

A tall, naked, salmon-pink butterfly
shivers in brazen moonlit air,
blazing with colourless silky smell of her carnivorous youth.
Her breasts are smeared with myrrh and cinnamon,
and thighs dotted with blossoms of silver.
As soon as I touch her
like a hermit cleanses his narcissistic soul—
ants begin to crawl across my bare sesame skin,
ravaged by rugged sins of civilization.

I perform a sacrifice at the edge of sunrise
a magic rite—
burning every desire in a bonfire of bougainvillea,
but the hunger returns the next morning
like powdered lacquer and she
runs away with caravans of wild-horned grasshoppers,
selling perfumes to poets and pilgrims.

Suddenly, a fire breaks out in the cloud-dusted sky.
all the cactus owls fly away—
I walk back again on the salt land,
searching for fading fingerprints of rain.