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			A Temple Pool Might Ignite Lotus-Blood from Your Heart George Kalamaras Not the wind in your hair but dying carp. Each curl a curving inward toward some damp sound. You ride the rickshaw like finally getting even. You dream you murdered the young man with too many turn-left-here's and stop-now-there's, and felt your life had closed. All night those spokes had followed you to tea stalls, lassi stands, even to the mirror you refused to kiss. Why do you wake each morning craving jack fruit, the bed- sheets still raised several inches stiffly above your waist? The wheel turns and turns. Blood rushes to the open wound. Empty spoke spaces shadow your thoughts? Salt-blotched rubber thongs on a stranger's feet are an unwound turban on a bed of nails? It's a question of controlling your passion, the yogi told you over and over with his eyes, chanting some strand of sound all the way from the Bhagavad-Gita down into fruit pits dried as beads in his hands. If the stirring in your groin was rotating lotus light, a temple pool might finally ignite from pure, gold gill-fire. If you could swallow the fin-flash of Kali's sword, pike Shiva's trident as hooks in your heart, the bleeding might stop.
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