After seeing Kipling’s Vermont Naulakha
“What is this," said the leopard,
"that is so 'sclusively dark,
and yet so full of little pieces of light?”
Yes, of course—it is something
I would do: drive clean
through to Vermont to see
the rhododendron blossom
open and watch Rudyard Kipling’s
Naulakha, his ship
of a house crest the hill
like its coming up from the bottom
of the tallest wave
and it made it, intact, sound
as it is. And those
pink or white domes that have
yet to expose themselves there,
early or late maybe, so don’t
they remind me, some of the ones
that are still velvet cinched,
(like an offstage curtain in the grip
of the star of the show)
of the stupas in Angkor Wat.
I wonder if Kipling saw, maybe
even walked there, and if he drew
a similar conclusion—I bet
he’d’ve loved looking up
through to the shimmer and blur
and pluck it like one of his fruit
from the trees he'd planted
down the road, and,
not quite ripe, let it come to rest
on his desk. Maybe, seeing it,
he’d take his time climbing
to wake in the faces placed
pace by pace and say ‘My
Josephine, my Josephine, she
would have loved to see…’
and here a Vishnu and here
a Buddha, an eye to ride by
on the tigers and the vipers
and once arriving, settle into
the lid of the fiercest of the gods
and sleep on his stone
lip, reaching up to touch
the point of his nose, or one
of his eight arms, or count
all the fingers, and imagine them all
folded like a rhododendron
on a cold Vermont morning
holding off until the sun comes up,
holding off until something
of Kipling is dusted up
from the desk he sat and patted
the head and cheek of his daughter
and looked out the window
and told her a story just so,
just like she asked him to.
