Parasitic Oscillations

I have seen it before, felt its upright tips across
my palms. Some marsh. Some protected coastline. Ein bischen

bitte of the greenery behind the fishmonger’s
glass. I watched the moments caught—yesterday, he insisted—

separated from their heads, from their tails, from their scales,
from every certainty, and he spoke so fairly

of taste, omelettes. I did not hide my light: Sie haben
forgessen…das Grün. He has not charged me. He waves one

hand above his head. Something evaporates there.
My little mouth, full of sea, my little head, full of

mud. Alone and red-handed in a rented room at
noon, finding correct names—sea samphire, sea pickle, sea

asparagus—worse than corrupt ones: Saint-Pierre, patron
saint of fishermen. The succulent stem was a straight

tablespoon of salt. At the middle of my life I
want that. Directness. More than what my cells make from tides.

Look! I shout out the window. I’m hidden in plain sight!
Someone else is thirsty. One granule crystallizes.

Past the coconut stand at Dandi beach a tourist
finds a clay pot floating in the surf. He removes black

sludge from inside and packs it among his belongings.
From the airplane the Arabian Sea looks like death.

The clay pot was in fact an urn. He discovers this
in dreams, in his bed with dirt under his fingernails.

The urn, the names, the marsh, the charge, the cells, and Gandhi
march on. Shall it be restored? My mother will die soon.

Last time she fell they spent weeks adding salt to her blood.
It is dripping from the roofs of castles, from IVs.

It is going where it is needed most. A.O. Hume
made a customs line from a hedge. I am reading it

now as the biergarten empties down the street. There is
a tax so large it becomes a cavern. We ride through

on a boat at a rate precipitated by stone.
The water there is the purest. I can taste it with

one finger. The German word for sea is meer and more
is mehr. Residue, residual, knowing difference.

Crystal-clear oscillations, sustained expirations
of Newton’s equations, it can take fifty years to
find a feather shaped like an arrow. I curl my lips
to simulate northern cardinals, ancient cedars,
low-dimensional puritans, shed imitations
of my upright stance. The escarpment, a dotted line,
purple and white trilliums announcing more vaccines.
Science in retreat, Kishori Amonkar sings man
mein anand, tan mein anand, as third waves deposit
funeral pyres along the banks of distant rivers.
I dream of American museums I could not
imagine, Indian songbirds conserved in drawers.
I play with three parameters of Bogdanov
-Takens bifurcation mapped to stiffness, pressure, and
time scale in the syrinx. I hear it first, the future.