New Year, Goa Poem by Jeet Thayil

The midnight's cataracts whiten,
and here's the sea hissing
its one stuttered consonant.

Leaf-printed, you track the moon
to a beached, bearded hull, a room
of vertigo or freedom

that narrows like memory.
Small flames ascend a tree
of light. The two-and-thirty

palaces of Bodhisattvam
tremble on the vellum-
smooth water, like flotsam.

If tonight the mind is queasy,
drawing thoughts like flies, he
is fine too with every crazy

scheme you devise, none crazier
than this pilgrimage to a pier
that seems to have disappeared,

leaving you seaborne at last,
ahead of you the past,
and all its famous cities lost.