Death

When the neighbourhood men
go to the hospital and fail to return,
It is then that I think of death

and of that sealed copper pot of holy water
locked away with the family jewels
in my mother’s steel gray storewell.

And I think of grandfather
for whom that pot was secretly procured.

But that aging healthfad,
who cured his diabetes with relentless dieting,
after his farewell visit to Kashi

had said, “When I am dead,
Don’t give me that polluted water.
That river is filthy with unburnt corpses.

It will make me retch in my after-life!”