Mythologies

The myths are logged in our collarbones,
travel through our mid riffs. Our stomachs
learn to home mythologies as prayer.

The Atlantic Ocean rises with salt; widening
tides in the acidic-alkaline waters. What are
we going to do with generations of tales about
rebirth if we don’t watch the revitalized sky
every morning with our offer of empty hands?

                                   *

Ancestor whales were first mistaken to be fossils
of another animal. Three hundred and eighty-seven
million years before, the first whales flowered out
of swamps lotus-like and began living on land.

When we travel towards an intercession of Lake
Ontario as a love-ritual, the embryonic-rain sky
and waters are indivisible. The ascendance reminds
me of when my father and I first entered Mettupalayam,
the rain-soaked coconut trees and Bhavani River.

For every muscle-memory, there is landscape-memory
that tells us places are more similar than different
and how memory, like the ocean comprises of buoyancy.

                                   *

After surgery, my doctor prescribes saline water
for its isotonic properties. The vestigial body
not unlike the ocean, regenerates with salt and water.

The only way I can be with all of my family
at the same hour is by standing on the edge
of an ocean, unravelling the quilts of prehistory
through conch shells that record psalms of water.
I know nautical miles are ceremonial for what they carry.

                                   *

When we enter the hinge-tide, snow-gray expanse
of water across the row of elm trees, watch blue herons
taking flight, we know our bodies are a holy legion.
A polygon spectacle of sunlight occludes any demarcation.

The waters rise like yeast dough. When the tidal wave
recedes, I point towards footprints near the shoreline
to find what animals, apart from us, have passed by.

This is what I know as a mountaineer: go during monsoons,
after the soil has firmly held onto rainwater. In a part
of Lohagad, in the Vinchu cha Kata, the scorpion shape

ascend calls out to me again. What is a country if not
a point of departure like segregations of lines on our palms?
The source is water. We return to water like a pantomime
sky precipitates. Our throats know the songs.

                                   *

Whale song is more than echolocation. Whales have varied
dialects. All male humpbacks sing the same song. During
the Cold War, when many whale species were at the brink
of extinction, a navy engineer heard fixed rhythmic sounds
from the ocean. It is years later that it was known to be
the songs of humpbacks, who have migratory patterns
that lead them to return to their place of birth. They swim
close to the shorelines like sea turtles. Bowhead whales
improvise the melodic lyrics. One hundred and eighty-four
songs of the Spitsbergen bowheads are recorded, some
containing a single phrase and oracular amplitudes.
Most bowheads sing underwater beneath heavy sheets of ice
during the polar night. Blue whales near the coast of Sri Lanka
repeatedly create songs of four note durations, lasting
for two-minutes, with seven repeating linear frequencies.
How do we recover if not through song?

                                   *

In the 9th century C.E., sailors used a kamal to navigate
the altitudes in an ocean. A knot in the cord held vertically

between the teeth would determine the location of the Sun
and Polaris. In the late 1500s, sailors used sunstone,

made of calcite to measure latitude. Even when clouds
gathered in the sky, birefringence helped locate

the direction of the sun through the two different
indices of refraction. Our maps align with angular light

and the slant direction of rain.
Our throats conjoin in song.