Boating on the Hooghly

I'm missing Calcutta, which seems a semi-magical place to me. We have often visited it in the cool season, which is beginning now. I wrote this poem after a visit there:

Boating on the Hooghly

The boatman frees us from the shore.
In sooty-soft evening we ride the strong current
as though it is we who are standing still,
while ships at anchor are speeding past,
and the men who huddle on their decks
are rushing to lean toward tin-can stoves,
to gild their faces with smoky light,
to turn their backs on the growing dark,

while Renu beside me sings
of stormcloud-coloured Krishna:

Mother, why am I so black,
when Radha is so fair?
You were born on a moonless night, child,
your body is the body of the night

and the boat becomes an almond-shaped bed
carrying us to sleep, and a dream
that a Serpent King with a jewelled hood
stirs in his underwater cave,
creates a vortex and sucks us down
to sing lullabies to his serpent wives.

The boatman will save us,
the splash of his long-handled oar will wake us.
He'll row toward the shore,
return us, clinging close to the bank,
through deep shadow and fitful light,
past ships and their cargoes of firelit faces,
to firm ground and the song's end.

(This poem was published in The Reader (U. of Liverpool) No. 11, Autumn / Winter 2002.)