Mother Bathing

Water pouring
down my mother's shoulders,
she is so serene her breath seems
an unrelated element uncoiling
under the cyan streams.

I look at her breasts, erect and round,
at the enormous plateaux of her hazel eyes
populated, like Babylon itself,
with garden-growing nations,
where a nomad
can no longer thirst for home.

The noon is calm and enigmatic.
I look and know
this memory will hum
through me and spin my spirit's wheel
with the persistence of Purattu's water.

Two servants make the still
ether break up and grow muter
as it lands on her articulate
hips and gains the ringing point
in which all sounds meet.

I follow a swelling jet
which streaks from between her breasts,
sporadically magnifies
the slow-heaving hairs and pores,
abruptly fills the lucid well
of her pleasing, irregular navel,
bringing out its cross-like base,

and slips down along the dimly
luminescent path into her night
whose cleaving,
imploding fatefulness
I cannot contemplate.

Some days ago
I saw a statue of Ninlil
while leaving
wheat-cakes at the door
of our temple.

How natural
both women hold their hands apart,
as if accepting the blood-laden
thudding heart
of ripe demonic heaven.

One brief-lived, locked inside
a dissipating echo, and the other,
sapphire-nippled, jasper-eyed,
now coming round as my night
draws closer.