Pancha Maha-Bhuta Rajiv Mohabir (bio) पृथिव्यापस्तेजो वायुराकाशमिति भूतानि —Nyāya Shastra 1:1:13 Akash, Sky You are not this. The body you now wearwill tear like silk. Khuda spoke, Be—and you were a blue expanse,sinew moored to bone. This house of stoneand mortar already falls apart. Inside your chesta swan will silhouette against the sun— Who looks upwhose body flies above, shadow blackening the earth,wings beating as a heart? [End Page 49] Vayu, Air A flute knifesits breath until mid–photic zonean ink cloud distorts any sense of shade, or light. These boulders weepand I too have become stone, igneous, pōhaku singing volcanicsong, scree piercedby airshifts: vent and koholā spout,parasitic zone of ash in fast dry, and my musicsplintering into sand of gold, gold sand of coraland bivalve bones. The miserere nobis caughtin a humpback's cranial sinus porpoises its tone for miles. Sprung of darkness:air and sound. [End Page 50] Agni, Fire This morning the sun summons greeninto leaves. Come fall, they burn in reds, yellows,oranges—until, brown, they release themselvesto dust. You marry around a flame,you will burn as an offering in the end. Your pyre's trees, woody now,thick in their past lives' thickets. But for now, light a clay lamp—At noon your skin darkens then smolders into white. [End Page 51] Jal, Water Speak, so this month of monsoonblows into deluge. Look, your torn veil cries outin the shehnai's voice, snagged on a thorn or underKrishna's foot—that villain. The clay pot you carryon your head he smashes with a hurled stone, and look,your sari floods— Naked footed, you danceon the potsherds. The Jamuna is now swollen, is now dry.The blue god haunts the air— a storm gathers as music.You are a clay vessel that breaks, sweet water called back to cloud. [End Page 52] Prithvi, Earth The foot's drum, a spinning body,hand molded into breath, dissolves into carbon, nitrogen,oxygen, and phosphorus. And what composes the thrumof the beating heart— chemical or alchemical?What the skin envelops, a star-nova, a universe expandsand contracts— Don't you know this phrase,this larynx, is clay? Even the reed at your lipsthat drinks your breath springs from the same soilthat you return to. [End Page 53] Rajiv Mohabir RAJIV MOHABIR is the author of The Cowherd's Son, published byTupelo Press in 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize, and The Taxidermist's Cut, published in 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017. He is the translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara, released by Kaya Press 2019. Currently he is an assistant professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College and translations editor at Waxwing. Copyright © 2019 University of North Carolina Wilmington