At noon in a dim chamber fifty feet under
Pune's dusty schoolyard roar, my voice
threaded through a hundred voices
and slipped out a hole in the dark.
The song became an eye watching
the cave's ear swallow taxi bleat
and creak of neem trees, gorge on every kind
of truck honk. Its black cup caught
and hammocked notes. It pushed our voices
on beyond a precipice marked, "Beware of God."
Since then, my throat has kept a dark space

apart from words. I am careful of
many-voiced hosannas that cluster
and vault contralto to heaven,
wary of earthquake bass and its power.
When a clarinet hits the monkey scream note
in a priestly procession, I press back.
When entering the temple of a hundred
chattering prayer wheels, I think of silence —
not in air, but the inner bell of nothing
or the call to something
higher than the muezzin's flapping laundry voice,
than wings can reach, deeper than a stone
falling down a well before it hits
water where the slap is human
but the echo divine, answering
a perennial invitation.