HELP. Pre -dinner party panic. Do I cook it or bake it?  Is paella paella without any saffron? (I forgot to buy saffron)

THAT SMALL red stone, there is one in every salmon. A stone but different because it vibrates — even extracted, covered in grit from the bank, even in your mouth — continues vibrating. So far upstream, how does a heart stay salty ?

WE STOOD, before the movie started, in the dark cinema, the whole crowd standing, mouthing to themselves an anthem, our hands quietly, one cupped in the other, in front where our laps will be when we sit down. On the screen the flag waved, in the wind from a computer, and the wheel on the flag spun. I think my uncle and my aunt besides were singing aloud. What a fine singing and from the speakers, too. We keep seeing these movies, with no idea what is supposed happen.

HERE, the swami’s sweetest cow, whom, tomorrow morning, we will have fed little bananas, yesterday’s prasad, blessed offerings, sadly blackening, and will I have been supposed to remove the peels? We will remove them. The slime neatly spread, a tongue thick as a wrist.

THE CHILDREN’S children. We had a week in the city with which to consider the arts along side the children from the neighborhood. We made both bugs and people, jumped up and down on the carpet. We did not use our inside-voices. Then we wondered aloud where do children come from.

FOR YOU, two.

ACHCHHI KHAD. In Hindi, we have learned about the future, and with it comes responsibility.

“You have gained more freedom in conversation in two ways — freedom to speak of the future and freedom to speak of farm life.”

I bring him good manure

I should bring him good manure

(an inner compulsion to bring him good manure, conscience, his crops are failing, my cows are productive, once, he may have left me some good manure, it was late one night, I may have taken a few of the cakes clinging to the side of his hut but I intended to return them)

I have to bring him good manure

(an external compulsion, contractual, say, or a danger to my person, possibly bhuta or minor spirit possession)

(unless manure bestowal were part of an exorcising ritual, in which case it would not be in the bhuta’s best interest)

Regardless, I will

Will you? Let’s say, we will bring good manure

At least, we are likely to

(how likely? whose shall we bring?)

(and if your intentions are purer, more deeply seated, than mine?)

I brought him good manure

(it was my habit, then you came)

THIS is where Tansen, one of Akbar’s nine jewels, burst into flames, singing.

AN ESSAY on cosmogony. First comes desert. Then, eggs. A tussle over who is bound, wherein the myna says “Now, Now” amidst the trash and there is everywhere trash. Meanwhile the forms elaborate, but the eye, in the center, stays very black. Looking for what to eat. Sparrows find a door into our room. A monkey falls from our tree. Again, a hungry ghost, considering the palace wall, looks up.

OVER the world. We found these, coldly on paper plate, Southbank London, we thought these might be the last for quite awhile. When in fact.

WE miss cake for we loves cake dearly. Safely, cake go safely.

THE holiday we keep in our mouths or in aluminum trays to catch the juice. In orchestrating such an event consider : digestive health; space on the plate; space in the eye; behind the glass what is edible; white gloves; what in Japan they eat with friends; in Peru.

THREE courses make an evening and pilfering cheeses makes friends. Imagine a palate grown the size of a room in which a conference of the blind must communicate through texture and laughing and several kittens running through the table legs. Imagine the room breathing, the laughing breathing, the cheeses in the center or resting on the participants’ heads also breathing. What are the stakes? Nobody can name them because the palate has grown the size of the world.

The other thirty four courses must go unpictured. We hold those inside, do not share them with others.