Dream of the Flute

Hear me out. Last Holi, I had a dream
during the daytime. I heard it first,
I wandered the woods to find this flute,
a tasseled flute, tessellated with stops,
so many no one man’s fingers could cover
the holes of that glowing honeycomb.
What was a flute doing aloft in the air like that?
It swam the spring wind over Vrindavan
like a box kite scaffolded with laugh lines.

The longer I looked, and my look was love,
I saw the stops bubble with blood,
the bamboo oozing heme-tinged honey.
The flute, floating past my grasp,
played its song for pleasure in spite
of the wounds drilled deep in its wood.
I sought to solace the song that solaced me,
this flute that breathed without a flautist,
but wondered whether touch would quench
that timeless flute like a tuning fork’s
shiver of sound. I bowed before it
and clasped my hands in a humble namaste.
Somehow the music its hollow housed
took on the contour of a living voice.

“I came of age among clacking stalks.
I was one of them, too, green and naive,
empty of suffering, empty of sense,
none of us hollowed out, as I am now,
by the breath of being, primrose-sweet prana.
A boy broke me, fashioned a flute of me,
just for the joy of making music.
Easy for him. My hollowing hurt me
worse than when he snapped my spine.
He burrowed, blasted, tunneled through me,
the shaft of me shucked, my marrow, air,
bone-biopsy pain, spirit-deep.

Then he breathed through me, and that breath
bathed me within with incense and balm,
soothed the scrape my body had become.
These stops opened up all over me
like pupils dilating to sip the light,
my rawness lined with one long retina.
My holes were holy, every single singing one
a blowhole on a whale born drowning.
I needed that gutting to be good enough.
Condemned and dynamited and redeemed,
I became the charm of the dark avatar
who sported a peacock-feather for panache.

I traveled with him, tucked at his waist,
no matter the risk to Krishna or me.
Swan-diving in a venom-swollen river,
we wrestled the river’s hundred-hooded
king cobra. I, too, faced the fangs.
When we won, we did a jig barefoot
on those hundred crumpled umbrellas.
Together we tooted a roguish raga
to mock evil by making music.
Pattern is superior to patter—
the only way to know the good is good
is knowing worse is worse than better.
Dance harder was the order of the day.
No matter how fast my midnight-fingered
partner played me, his breath’s blue breeze
blew through me, endlessly as wind.
Infinity is never not beginning.

I made the music I was meant to make,
funneling a gale force God
through a boy’s bansuri, regaling gopis
and calming cows. His music made me
more than myself, miracle bamboo,
my pith his breath. Gokula’s girls
followed his flute’s figure-eights,
eyelids aflutter as if with seizures.
I was less instrument than instinct,
the most natural mode of his immanence,
music outmaking its own lyrics, like
the poem he preached at Kurukshetra.
Scriptures speckle my inner surface
like so much dust in a plastic straw.
One note clears me, Sanskrit blown
away, the words of sutras so much soot
where music is flame and the match is the flute.
Gods and Goddesses swirl apart in my wind
tunnel like trees turning in autumn,
but the heat and moisture of his heart music
make a tropics immune to time
with its own latitude and its own longing,
its own rains and its own orchids.

Empty your ego to form a flute
fit to accept his almost-kiss.
Spin with worlds and pinwheels
sitting still in a yogic pose,
meditation molded into melody.
You may think that you can’t carry a tune,
that you’re laughably leaden-footed,
no good at dancing, definitely not
with the good time gopis of Gokula—
but your guru knows how good you are.
Caught up in the lila, you come alive.
Flute of bamboo, flute of bone,
he’ll thread the music through your mouth.
Laughter has no choreography.
A flute has no voice but devotion.”

Blood dripped and dotted my brow
and burned, like acid, a third eye.
A sudden monsoon steamed off the agony,
but a diamond mineshaft sank itself
into the mountain of my inwardness.
Filled to the mouth with flute music
like a miner flailing in a flooded mine,
I saw the forest I had seen in stories,
neem trees, dream trees of Vrindavan.
I saw the Yamuna swirl with yearning.

None of my physician friends know
the way that woodwind wills me
to write and read in a fool’s frenzy,
in a rabid religious bother.
Maybe I’m the empty one,
while they are full, thoughtless, free.
The pretty pond behind the house
overlooking the golf course
in their eyes lacks no lotuses.
Lavender sprigs in late spring
are enough to make them kneel and marvel.
Not an ambition they can imagine:
to be sculpted, shaped, a soundscape
where adoring gopis orbit a God.

We devoted few, we fans of the flute
will meet in a mystical clearing.
No birth or death for the breath-bodied
jugalbandi of abundant joy.
The boy will bring us to his lips, no loftier
exaltation than his exhalation.
I am lighter. I am so light
light is slipping through my lattice.
Craving for Krishna carves out my core.
It has left his breath a perfect path.
My nipples, navel, eyes and ears
burrow straight to the holy hollow
of my new form, a newborn flute
recreated for his recreation,
no longer a captive of lingering karma.
Breathe through me, I beg
as I sense my senses are abysses
that lead down to the one Musician.
Extemporize me out of time.
Separate pleasure and sin
with simple syncopation.
Riff me seamlessly out of samsara.

2023: New Year Double IssuefluteIndian literaturepoem