Amit Majmudar

Hymn to Kali

1.

Kali, your necklace of skulls

Strings lover, rapist, lover, rapist

All the way around.

Kintsugi, incandescent, seals

The squiggles between the bones.

Is that the original hair

Or black grass plastered

To the domes?

Kali, your necklace of skulls

Strings savior, fascist, savior, fascist

All the way around.

Kali, your calvaria hennaed with firefly mash,

Kali, your softly knocking noggins

Wag their mandibles

As if they want to speak

Or sing,

Our skulls, our blackened-electrical-eyesocket skulls,

Poet, poet, poet, poet

Threaded on a string.

2.

My goddess,

leaning closer to a mirror that dims 

around her image,

limns her whiteless all-one-

pupil eyes with black.

My goddess

shouts how there is no time

to her teen sons still upstairs

and, after giving the galaxy another stir,

takes her coffee black.

My goddess,

beautiful when angry,

when murderous, divine

dances onstage in the fearsome persona

of a Devi named Black.

My goddess

cried out in the dark three nights ago,

hennaed foot a wounded songbird in my palm,

her stubbed pinky toe

bruising, before my eyes, to black.

3.

Your tongue is out to taste the sawed bone on the air.

Jupiter on a stick, your marbled hydrogenous lollipop

Hisses and burns where you lick, its storm a charred-flesh eschar.

Your every tastebud is a burial mound. Mama, bury me alive

In one of those worm wombs, Mama, scrape me

Across the hot pink strike-strip of your runway tongue

Until I flare and roar, your matchhead, your methhead, your Amit, your thug

Strangling wayward missionaries with a black bandanna

I tug from deep in my gorge, a long and lethal, silken python tongue.

4.

Kali

comes from kala,

Time,

coal-black incalculable Time

callous when you call out, zero

degrees Kelvin coldhearted toward a coward’s kyrie,

colossal Kali

crowned with crows (caw, caw), her color

the absence of light, helter-skelter Kali’s

culling of culpable us a long time

coming, Kali

inculcating killers

in her gullet-cutting cult, Kali

branding a Rub al-Khali

on the still soft skull of the planet, calamity Kali

dissolving on her tongue a stillborn’s frosted caul, Kali

fangs down, tits out, venom

from the one, from the other

cosmos-mothering colostrum.

5.

If Time’s an arrow, Huntress, let it arc,

Cutting the sun a wheelrut through the dark.

If Black’s your color, Nightshade, work your will

And spread dominion like an oil spill.

Spread-book invagination, snowcapped mons,

Horizon waist chain, navel pierced with dawn,

Curvaceous earth, body and shoal, your landscape,

No form in anything save what your hands shape,

Kali, why fill this sandbox for your young,

Why branch these bronchi, leaf the lifegreen lung,

Why shiver up the gooseflesh dunes of Kutch,

Set bells, moons, minds, hives ringing at your touch,

Leave heelprint Black Seas everywhere you trod

Only to let these little men play God?

6.

Dama, says my household Goddess, has more than one meaning, like so many words in that
language, but it’s never arbitrary like pen and pen, because the Gods don’t play dice and
especially not when it comes to words, so when a yogi uses it, dama is self-control, you’re
controlling the passions, desires, the senses, Amit are you paying attention, but in mythology,
Amit can you keep your hands to yourself for like a minute, okay, now listen, in mythology,
Kali goes killing the demon, the demon whose every drop of blood sprouts another one of him
out of the ground, self-replicating, right, exactly like a virus, or a meme, so she catches his
blood in a bowl and drinks it so the seed never lands in the soil, that’s when dama’s other
meaning kicks in, and subduing the more more more in you becomes killing a demon because
that is the internal Mother disciplining you, the Motherboard overriding desire’s futile neural
impulses, in a word, yoga, because inside every would-be holy man is a far holier woman, naked
yes but nonsexual, smeared in ashes, wearing a necklace of skulls and every skull is his, her
fierce hair whipping in the wind, and she’s shouting in Sanskrit dama, dama, dama, control,
control, control, but every time she says control she’s also saying kill

7.

Things thrum.

            Being is a beehive, even in a birthed stone.

            The parked wind’s engine, ticking: That is time.

            A lightbulb-yellow pear, an Aum, a breast lump:

Things thrum.

Things throb.

            Even an apple can surprise your palm.

            The pulse scurries away if you watch your watch.

You’ll find out, at the door of the Law, when you grasp its knob,

Things throb.

Things ache.

            And you will never hear or feel them do it.

            Not all sufferings have a bruise to show you.

            Lump in my throat, idol at the bottom of her lake:

Things ache.

8.

Mahakali of the ten arms, ten heads, ten legs, namaste,

namaste, destructive seductress—

the shade of your lipstick, dark matter,

rage your only rouge.

Electroshock Shakti, Shakti shellacking evil,

I clap my palms together, bow to you,

but you bow me, blow me back the other way—

the only right way for a palm tree to worship the hurricane.

Ten is ten thousand, and ten thousand is infinite: O

barefooted millipede Goddess, I see you

rivering noiselessly up the thigh of catatonic Shiva,

tickle, tickle, tickle.

Every well our thirst ever sank

has found its way down to your navel, popped

through and drawn directly from your womb,

in the desert of being, our amniotic canteen.

In the desert of transcendence, Shiva lies in shavasana,

corpse pose. You, lively Shakti, straddling his immortal rigor

writhe atop him, and your spine undulates in sin waves

that match and modulate his brain waves.

If love and creation each get a God of their own,

why not sex and destruction, too? Both in one,

and both a woman: You, Mahakali, dressed

to kill, dabbing cyanide perfume on all ten of your wrists.

9.

Her body is dark matter. His is solid light,

A searchlight thrust high into unknowing.

They stalk each other, passion’s passionate

Assassins. He knows her curves

By inference, from how she makes time

Swerve a little to make way for her hips.

Spikenard inflects the solar wind.

The stars are funeral pyres, which he visits

Mourning his dead from a time before life.

Soon she is so in heat, he mistakes her

For virgin hydrogen, fusing for the first time.

She wants him to be her water and her lather,

The downpour and the pale ruff of bubbles

Proliferating where she rubs, like cells dividing.

They launch across the parsecs at a hint

Of heat shimmer warping a constellation,

Arms wide, long hair at a level flutter, moonlit

Rivers flowing in opposed directions,

Each with mirror image currents. Distance

Buckles, their bodies slam together, train crash

Shock waves lost in the vanishing points

Behind them, twinned foci of the same ellipse.

Matter and antimatter mutually

Annihilate, becoming something new,

Not gendered but engendering, a kind

Of love the way humans are a kind of mammal.

The power they release is language

If language had the power to release us.