translated by Paramita Banerjee and Carolyne Wright

In a darkness like spring poems, folktales

                        and vanished cats,

trucks parked by the garage. Today,

                        grime and the poet Tulsi Das

are the gods of the garage. A rat today,

looking into the face of the night, the storm,

                        the book and bat, wants to leap across

this darkness.  But the boy – blackened by

the deaf smell of spring blossoms – wants

                        to dunk God

in gasoline and haul him out again. The rat,

still without memories, circles around the gasoline,

gnawing at the desolate spring blossoms,

                        the poet Tulsi Das, and darkness.