Mahabalipuram

I was going through some old bits of paper and found this poem, which I probably copied from the New Yorker, before I ever imagined that I would be living half an hour's drive from Mahabalipuram. It's by contemporary writer and painter Gulam Mohammed Sheikh:

Mahabalipuram

Man's dream here has a very sharp edge:
teeth-marks of the hungry dead
pit the flanks of domesticated beasts.
Staggering badly, a thirteen-hundred-year-old wind
passes between a sow's sagging dugs
and yesterday's sculptors' rough fingers,
straining to sink inside, are tugged
into the spotted feathers of hens, purposelessly alive.
Chameleons slumber at ease in the belly of rubbish
and
slime-covered frogs poke obscene fun at God
who sits exhausted on the steps;
crabs
peeping through a cypress's dry skin
giggle like fish,
and there,
fallen like a raw black rock
on a clump of wild flowers,
idle Satan
yawns and writhes awake.

--Gulam Mohammed Sheikh (from the Gujarati)