(Prelude: Electric Blue)

She scrubs a paper towel against the skin of her throat
over the rough sketch of her collarbone
until the paper begins to unravel-- the soap
smells of of old toenails-- and she dresses that way,
with the skin still wet. The only way to survive until darkness.
The old woman said that heat is like love;
you have no choice but to embrace it before it
smothers you.

She has wondered how many women
in this country die
this way every year. Heatstroke. A burning of blood.

The light bulb over the sink gasps for life
and with each shudder, the light flickers, flickers, flickers.
Her reflection trembles with that wavering glow.
She closes her eyes and imagines the
jaw of a certain man
spilled open to the floor when he sees the strange thin girl
who has to hold her skirt up with one hand
to keep it from falling to her ankles.
Imagines the inevitable accusation that once again,
she is using herself as a weapon against him.
Imagines the inexplicable descent into another
argument. The broken tables and shattered flatware
as mute witnesses against them, although
as usual no one would not know how it started.

No, she does not imagine this.
She remembers instead the girl who once lay on a
white cotton sheet in a field of drowning grass as
lightning flowers blossomed across the sky;
the girl who transcribed her love
onto their skins because she wanted a
memoir
of them.
Because even then she was afraid to forget.
In her mind, the girl clenches the blue ink pen, tracing
fingers up the inside of his forearm. A spidery script:
beloved.
(I am my beloved's
as my beloved is mine. A vow they say
at weddings.)
The band of wedding metal around the base of her finger
glows white in between the fall of
petals from the lightning flowers: adamantium.
Not a precious metal but one that supposedly will not
shatter. It is the same metal that is inside him, so she was meant
to carry it as a piece of him on her hands,
always. Always.

She sold it for twenty-eight rupees and a bowl of rice.

But that was years after
they draped each other in electric blue.
Her words glowed when she spoke them,
like fireflies or like
something else. A sparkler struggling to stay lit
in the rain.
(I knew you would become my husband. I have
foreseen all of this in a dream; only in the dream we
never went back to the room.
Beethoven brought us breakfast
on the grass. He wore a yellow silk waistcoat
and served us the hearts of plums and the skin of
tangerines. Food of lovers.)

Lover. The word ran from his fingers down the side of her
wrist in dark block letters like water
running off the edge of their saturated faces.
Also, like tears.

This is the end of the remembering.

In the back shops of streets devoid of rain,
she purchases a postcard from the man with teeth of
rotted ivory.
A black and white taxicab on a street of white petals,
leftover from the celebration of a god. Steam on the windows,
and behind the steam, a single hand pressed against
the glass. Fingers splayed.
Ignoring the epileptic convulsions of the metal fan,
she scribbles onto the back of the postcard.
Six words, one number.

Signed,
M.

---

(Aquamarine)

Moti Sweets: the sign decays
above the stone building
beneath the telephone wires, above the
exposed plumbing
jutting out from the wall like broken skeleton ribs.
A leprosy of rust. Don't drink the water.
(Impossible, he thinks. I must have read it wrong.
But this is the address. He reads it again
for only the hundredth
time, by now.)

Jhaveri Bazaar
Moti Sweets.
Rm. 3.

The old man who smells of sugar cane,
salt sweat,
and chickens-- tries to sell him candied bananas
until he produces the black and white photograph.
The only one he did not burn, back when
her memory only appealed to him when
flammable.
It is not her smile but a fifty dollar bill that earns him
rights to her room. Now he stands alone in the hall.
Again waiting at her doorstep.
He wipes the sweat from his temples with the
bones of his wrist, but succeeds only in smearing heat
from one part of his body
to another part of his body.
She must have been out of her mind to come here,
he says to himself. And then:
she must have been brilliant.
A needle in a big, hot, haystack. He knocks.
No answer.

Part of him wonders what he'll do if he finds her
with a man, with a hand that is not his wrapped around
her waist or resting on her shoulder. What did she do
upon the inversion of such discoveries? That day she searched out
the invasion of another woman's lips
across the countries of his skin, countries she had
colonized, civilized with her own two hands
only to lose possession during cold warfare.
He remembers a slamming of doors, a breaking of glass.
(But this was his, this was not hers. His grand, theatrical
efforts at denial.)
He remembers she talked in silk instead of words.
She tied the aquarmarine scarf around her throat,
(the scarf he bought for their
third anniversary, the one they spent in Paris,
without once coming up for air.)
and it unfurled in a long clean line of I Love You as she
fell from the balcony.
A swan dive.
He broke his hands trying to beat her to the ground,
and also his left kneecap.
He caught her with every bone in his hands
smashed like china but
the splintered colors of her eyes
rendered all his lesser, selfish sacrifices somehow
pointless.

His second knock dissolves in the wet heat of the
besotted hallway. (Besotted:
a word she used to whisper
in his ear. She explained it meant to be limp with
something, soaked through every skin.)
This time he opens the door, expecting, he doesn't know,
the making of love
the hiss of a shower
the silk love song of a tied scarf and a body
dangling from the fan. Rattle, rattle, rattle.
What he finds is unexpected: emptiness. Vacancy.
A neatly made bed, the blankets worn but
barren of cockroaches; a window with dark green shutters
spilling the emptiness into the street outside,
ringing hollow against the metal of cars and bicycles and
the bits in the mouths of restless camels.

Abandonment: a door slammed in his face, on
his just-healed fingers when he tries to stop the
forward motion that inevitably will carry her out of his
grasp.
Each time she leaves him feels like the
very first time. He is limp without her.
Besotted.

The second postcard boasts a parasailer
with a huge silk parachute of green and blue and orange
floating above the ribbon of a dirt road twisted through
the matted hair of a wet, dark valley.
The trees seemed bloated with water; he envies this.
On the front, orange block letters spell
the next place she claims to wait for him.
Varansi.
On the back, in the thinnest pencil, she scribbles
Bus. Station. Sink.
He folds the glossy paper and
hides it from his sight so he will not lick it
to see if he can taste her fingers
pressing the lead into syllables.
He places it in his breast pocket:

inadvertently close to his heart.

---

(Ice-blue)

Dawn ignites the bus station: grimy, red-eyed with
smoke and exhaust, groaning with the weight of its vehicles,
its weariness, its thousand moving parts. A description
not far removed from herself.
She runs her hand over the scars on her wrist to
remember the first bus station
in this long line of cracked mirror restrooms and
broken benches and graffiti tile.
(The old monk in quiet saffron robes ran his coffee-skin
finger down the scars on her arms. The old burns, the cuts.
Oh my child, he whispers, oh my child. My daughter,
what have they done unto thee. She held herself bitter against him
because she believed him insane and
she envied that, having
never quite reached that oblivion. She always
knew exactly what she was doing,
every time.)

But this is another story.

A story consistent with matches, the way gasoline
trembles and explodes at the barest kiss of
heat. Unlike the story
that is the temperature of ice,
blue ice chips floating in black Arctic oceans.
The temperature of her blood to at last see the
enemy between her bedsheets, to discover
not even a woman she knew, but a stranger
with smoked honey in her voice who claimed her name
was Angelina.
(Who says, I'm here for his things. He's going to be
staying in my loft now, until his hands heal.
He broke bones for you, you little witch.
He makes them stay broken.
You heartless witch.
Is that what you call love?)
She had no weapons to reply to that. She touched the necklace
of bruises from the scarf and the broken skin
from the pavement where
she fell through his useless hands.
He said he wants his the tags back, Angelina grinned.
A frosted pink poision,
a glint in the eyes of a dagger twisting
into the throat of a victim bound hand and foot.
Unable to escape.

While they're loading the bus, she stops by the fruit vendor
and purchases three lemons,
a bag of raisins. One flower,
the fire petals already wilting in her hand
in the morning heat.
The bus groans down the road, across train tracks.
A sky that prophecies of rain,
a mud brick horizon, a man in beige shorts
walks barefoot down the tracks, his shirt slung
over his shoulders.
How mundane his life must be, she thinks, palms
spread flat agains the dirty windowpane. How
boring. How I desire it.

(How can I love you if it's killing us,
her husband said, after
that latest fight when she slammed her face
into the glass medicine cabinet,
and he stabbed himself in the hip
in an attempt to outdo her. Even then they knew
that the quickest and most efficient way to break each
other was to break themselves.
And then he won
after he discovered how to break her
using someone else.)

She bites into the lemon,
tearing through the peel, sucking the juice
and pulp across her tongue. Into her throat.
She says three Hail Mary's on the
acid taste, and tacks on Forgive Us Our
Trespasses.
She uses the bitterness as an excuse
for the blur of tears that she won't let fall,
not this time.
They hover around her eyes
cataracts that erase the horizon, the town,
the man, the sky, the world.

---

(Azure)

He will carry the bus rides
inside his bones even after he exits the
deathtrap buses:
the ache in his head from machine-gun barrages of
squalling brakes and babies, omni-present livestock,
the choked roar of the engine.
The cramping in his legs from sharing the seat
with an old woman and her hens, the pain in his back
from spending a day, a night, a day, rattling
against the wall. Sleeping in snatches.
The latest postcard shows white sand dunes
by the river, before dawn, as a boat filled with pilgrims
drifts like a prayer toward the shore.
A woman in a white sari and shawl
balances on the prow. Her face an engima.
Green letters above her head: Asra.
On the back: Ahmedabad Flea Market.
The Elephant Room.

Day, night, day.
He eats his second orange the morning they arrive
at the Asra station and drops the peels
on top of the small pile of lemon peels in the floor
beneath his seat, recently discarded.
The scent of
bitterness and tears.
He carries this scent into the disorder of
the market: a table of pet fish swimming in empty
liquor bottles, a door and its frame
propped against the stack of other
furniture prosthetics. A lawn chair in the middle
of the pile, its blue-white awning peeling
like a sunburn.
The boy who sells the pet fish
(and chainsmokes cigarettes from the pack
on his hip)
leads him to another of the anonymous,
bland tea stalls he has grown accustomed
to visiting, one that rents rooms upstairs.
The owner of the joint shows no surprise at his
American face.

She said you come.

Two days ago this would have left him
hollowed out as by electricity, but he
has no energy for expectations. He's worn
threadbare, exhausted.
He's running out of clean underwear.
The bed threatens collapse under his weight;
let it. He'll sleep on a mattress and bare boards.
But at that moment before he surrenders
to the united protest of every muscle, every bone,
he notices the table beside the bed.
A small black bowl, filled with raisins,
and the dried petals of a red flower,
newly lit against the black fruit.

(Her habit, once, to vanish before dawn and return
bearing food to place beside his bed, to pass it
from her hands into his mouth.
And then it was inverted,
after the rumors of the Other Woman,
when she refused to eat at all,
unless he broke the bread
with his own two hands and
pressed it to her own two hands.
She hoped to tie him to her with the
threat of her emerging rib cage.)

Now it has been inverted again.
And what does he have left
with which to tie her to himself?

---

(Cobalt)

She stares up into the shower so cold
she gasps for breath
but not only from the water.
The cold brings out the bruises on her palms,
hardening them into blue-purple-green
knots of flesh and bone.
Her knees and shaking, she can't keep herself
straight up, she beats her fist
against the wall.
Beloved, beloved, beloved.
She wants the illusion that she'd forgive him
everything, that she'd be clay in his hands.
He could mold her into any truth, anything
he wanted, and she'd believe it. That's what love is,
remember, it's the devouring heat.
She crumples in a
heap on the shower floor, like a damp dress,
left across the clothesline, limp.

Once she placed her voice at the
hollow of his throat and whispered, if I ever
lose your eyes, my eyes will not close
until I find you again.
I swear this.

Outside the tin roof shakes with the
white furious downpour, and she lusts for it,
every pore in her body screaming.
Wash the heat away from me, wash the heat away.
She leaves the bathroom, crosses the room
to the window. Bare feet, bare arms, bare head,
the sari wrapped haphazardly around her
body. Her fingers caress the smooth spines
of the dark burnt orange shutters
and she can feel the wind through the
cracks. A howling love song.

She throws the window open and
spreads her arms before the storm. Eyes flung open,
head flung back. The wet cotton cloth becomes
a double layer of skin to hide the bruises,
skin that feels no heat,
only water.
The rain pounds hard, insistent, against
the skin of her throat.
Two syllable rain-drops.

Lo-gan. Lo-gan. Lo-gan.
She throws the name into the mirror
as she breaks it, as she throws its pieces
into the street. This is only the
beginning.

Once she dipped her fingertips in paint and
smeared it over his closed eyelids,
cobalt blue
over the bones above his eyes and she
whispered,
I am only as alive as you make me.
You are only as alive as I make you.

So she also believes he betrayed her
with his ability to live without her.
The way she understood love,
it should have brought him to his knees.

Wait, here's the irony:

Thirteen miles behind her,
a man begins to walk in the middle of the road
away from the bus that has been clogged with mud,
and unbuttons his shirt.
And breathes in the rain because it beats out
the mystery of a woman's name.
He wants to hold her in his lungs so she
cannot possibly escape because the
only way out is through his mouth.
And he would keep his teeth clenched, locked.
To protect himself from her.
To protect her from him.
To re-learn the ways of breathing for two
at the same time.

He will dream in cobalt.

---

(Interlude: Sapphire)

This is the snapshot from that time
when the adamantium rings
still bound them together in that hard
soft embrace of steel and love:

She struggles under the weight
of metal bones
as she lifts him onto the bed,
slowly, not without pain,
and removes the bloody uniform, the
useless bandages,
and wraps him instead in a cocoon of
sapphire sheets and lies beside him until he
does not shake in pain. In the worst moments,
he cannot even bear the thin weight of her wrist upon his
chest without screaming.
He will let no one else touch him because
there is nothing they can do.
She wets her fingers and drips the water
across his mouth, onto his forehead, kissing every place
where the drops fall.
When we stand before God, she whispers,
How we will appear.
as lovers, as beloveds, as brother--sister outlaws?

No, he whispers,
I have foreseen that you will be a pair of wings
over my head, protecting me from the
eyes of the angels
who would never understand the places I have been.
We appear in heaven as one apple tree
planted by a river.
I will be the bark and you will be the blossom.
All the children of war and pain will eat of our fruit
and be satisfied.

---

(Midnight Blue)

This is how his return was supposed to have been:
Rain slides down the window pane
with the soft glow of midnight blue sky as
they curl up in the smallest ball
and forget
the times they buried each other alive
and pretended not to hear.
They forget they did not always resurrect
as the same people,
capable of the same love.
They deny the existence of the Other Woman
He wraps the dog tags and their chain around his wrist,
around her wrist, binding them together.
I am my beloved and my beloved is me.
A variation on the theme.

And this is when he would have her tell him
that he left starlight inside her
that it became his child, growing all these months.
He wants to see her belly swollen with
memories of him.
He wants to have marked her, somehow,
to drape a sheer scarf over the womb and say
now we exist in one body,
a part of you and a part of me.
So even if you walk away again, even if you
have the right,
I will follow you around forever.
And you will follow me.

But this is not what happens.

Her room is a war zone: furniture broken,
as if by bombs, lamps smashed into the
walls. The bed completed turned over, limp, as
a woman with her spine snapped. One lightbulb
survives, shocked and dazed as a refugee.
It always shocked him,
the red desperate strength of her rages,
somehow so much more violent than even his best
fury.

(The last time she let him in her bedroom,
after she knew everything, after she knew where he
spent those Friday evenings on the road,
she broke a plate across his skull.
And he wiped the blood from his eyes and
smeared it across her eyes so they were both
blind for the duration of things.)

A sudden paralysis: centered on the heart, but also
spreading to the lungs. Asphyxiation.
He's seen the heap of wet yellow cloth in the corner,
a heap the size of a woman's body.
The sari has fallen back from one shoulder so he
can see the long, jagged scars on her arm.
He can name them all,
time, date, place.
He is ashamed that his skin has nothing to show.

(Penance, she mumbles, a whisper softer than
the rain, softer than heat, softer than blue, a
tiny almost-crying that breaks him
every time.
You broke your hands for me. Now I suppose
that could have been a gesture of love.)

He cups her face in the palm of his hand,
through the sheet, as holding water;
shh, shh. Don't talk now. He moves his hand
and she pours back into herself,
right through his fingers.

So he wraps her in the sheets, slides his arm
under her body: she groans, for the first time
he panics.
Why is it that he can never remember
how to touch her
without causing her pain?
He carries her out of the war zone,
down the streets, ignoring the stares of
street vendors and children and old monks
He carries her right up the back stairs of the room
he has rented,
he doesn't stumble or trip.
She is the one in the cocoon now, he is the one
spread around her as wings.
His mouth is pulling back from the cut on her neck,
just the barest touch,
the slightest healing. A Band-Aid. He brings her wrist
up to apply another such bandage, but
she stops him.

(I can't love you yet. Maybe in a week, maybe in a month,
this will go away but I still remember her. I do
But I want to go home. Take me home, I'm tired
of running myself into the ground.)

Her eyes leak water, she's raining, he thinks.
And then: it's not rain.
Her whisper is the soft, harsh tearing of silk:
tell me, lover, tell me why I wasn't enough, why I can't
keep love, why it all leaks out. Tell me what's wrong
with me. What is diminished in my soul?

And this is too much for him.
And he walks into the bathroom, shuts the door,
and plunges his face into a sink of cold, cold water,
his entire head submerged,
drowning out the words he can't say to her
because he's proven
that he doesn't have the strength to keep them
from becoming lies.

All this is done in silence,
the silence of afternoon heat, the silence
of useless love evaporating, evaporating,
and that's what makes the humidity cling to the
mirrors, that's what leaves sweat on the
windowpanes.

---

(Postlogue: Indigo)

So they heal quickly;
it's what they're manufactured to do.
She's on her feet by morning; she wears
his t-shirt and pair of his jeans into the bazaar
to buy fresh clothes,
and returns in denimn cutoffs
and a Coca-Cola t-shirt that's seen better days.
Also a a pair of thick sunglasses.
He does not ask her where she has been and she
does not ask him how he has survived apart
from her; all subjects are now sterile, cauterized.
Heat-sealed.
She won't meet his eyes. When they talk, if they
talk at all, it is of simple, common things.
There is, however, a bright spot:
he buys two tangerines
and they eat them when the night grows hot with stars,
and the juice covers fingers,
chins, hands, mouths.
He can't find napkins. She laughs at his
ridiculous helplesness, and he laughs
at hers. Or they are laughing at their memory of
laughter. Moments like this return
at odd miraculous intervals
of the journey home, when by some light,
they are transformed. He loves her again, and she
loves him. These are only moments:
he knows she will never forgive him for
hanging his past
around another woman's neck;
he will never forgive her for refusing
to let him catch her when he tried to break her
last, brilliant fall.

Then later, as she stands in his room, upon the return,
and notices that he keeps the torn Paris scarf
tied around his bedpost, she asks him:
(how did we end up in this place, how could we
become so stupid, so unseeing, so given over to
blindness? I once swore I could not live without you.
But I am living, at least by threads, and it's enough.
It's enough.
It will have to be.)

His hand with its heavy metal
traces its way to her hand then
falls back to his side.
Then they walk away,
both dreaming of that drowned grass field and
the garden of lightning in the sky, straining to
read the vows of love written on each others skin.
But it's raining too hard, for too long,
By now all the letters have washed away,
all that's left is a stain of blue,
an indigo
splotch of ruined ink from
the lost words:
lover. beloved. lover. beloved.
All drowned now.

Drowned in blue.