Swept Away
Selvakumar had waked too often to the shouts
of dogs — come home too many times
to an empty chicken coop, stray feathers
where dinner was supposed to roost.
Finding two dogs in his house one night,
he slammed his door to trap them,
gathered stones and — the flinging done —
gibbeted the bodies from a tree.
A week later, he woke in darkness, feeling
himself swept down a black, stinking hole
the way in Kansas City, Missouri,
Inspector Daniel Collins, smacked by a surge
of sewer-water, slipped from his safety line
and clattered down a 28-inch pipe
dark as the grave it seemed about to be.
Waking from sound sleep that morning,
wolfing a breakfast of high-fiber
toast and raisin bran, Dan never dreamed
a real nightmare would swallow him.
Selvakumar — squeezed by his nightmare —
screamed. One ear was deaf; both hands
were numb; his legs, too weak to hold
his weight, tongue lolling like a dead fish
in his mouth the way Dan’s did
as liquid filth shoved his head under,
while — first thrashing and battering,
then not — he rolled/banged/slithered
through earth’s bowels in darkness worse
than what seized Irmgard Holm’s left eye
when, after cataract surgery, she groped
for eye drops in the night, grabbed a Super
Glue tube, and sealed her lid tight.
Doctors took Selvakumar’s cash, and shook
their heads. A village healer diagnosed,
“The dogs cursed you.” To break the curse,
friends caught a stray, named her Selvi —
Repentance — wrapped her in an orange sari,
and hung a purple garland on her neck.
Selvakumar — all in white, but for a purple
garland like his bride’s — felt his dead
legs quiver as she edged toward him.
Even as he pledged eternal love, he planned
to wed a woman when his health returned.
Unlike a two-legged wife, though, Selvi didn’t
hound him about the marital act, didn’t
demand a better sari or a bigger home,
or nag as he grew more helpless every day.
Easy to laugh, invoking Brad & Angelina,
Pyramus & Thisbe. Still, on the night
Selvakumar found himself rushing again
down the dark hole, who can say that Selvi
didn’t guide him — as Irmgard’s husband
led her to the doctor who dissolved the glue
and saved her eye — as Daniel’s cries
led rescuers to him, twelve feet underground,
two miles from where he began —
as the son of Marjorie Potts Gaffrey
(dead in her sleep at 99), by sprinkling
his mother’s ashes in her favorite flower pot,
led Marjorie to wake as an African violet,
sun bright on her leaves as it was
in Daniel’s and Irmgard’s eyes, the dew
of morning like the feel, as Selvakumar lay
dying in his bed, of Selvi’s tongue.
Source: Poetry (November 2015)