I fell into conversation with an ash-smeared and completely naked sadhu …
——William Dalrymple
If I leave I will not order boxes
There will be no packaging tape
no moving men
no truck
I will take none of it
A blanket, a water bottle
A coat of ashes
A poem attributed
to the wrong author
A corrupt index
A broken database
A partial catalogue of songs
A blanket, a water bottle
A coat of ashes
A sky, a sun, a system
of monosyllables
The pure tone
of each electron
The pure functions
The math inside the atom
The muscles connecting
the trunk to the legs
The tendons connecting
the moon to the earth
The ligaments connecting
the brain to the bones
A blanket,
A coat of ashes
The epigraph is from Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, by William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury 2010, pp. x-xi.
From A coat of ashes
Jackson 