& for your strangely vigorous health, on the night streets of Kathmandu, the city-village where electricity functions for just half the day, & in the Thamel district there is no light after dusk but candles & white-as-death fluorescence from solar generators choppy as dying helicopters & the streets carry you through half-visible chaos of shops & rickshaws as if inside a warm ocean current, so many stars & this bright moon delicate as a bird bone igniting the awesome Himalayas & one spectral brown face speaking Hello friend where you from you like smoke hash? & apartments decrepit & ugly in daylight are now iconic, nightmarish, windows candlelit out-of-sync like a run-down stage set, a motorbike behind you shrieks & its headlight casts an image of you against the wall, a long shadow three stories tall, not recognizably you, the cries of boys laughing & a twang of badminton rackets beside a fire of plastic bags & bottles & grass & garbage, one brown dog in the post-dry-season pulverized dirt watching the low flame with dark eyes, with the wisdom of a small sinless demon, as if it were about to say All gestures made without heart will be revealed & soon, & in the oily dark birds great in number dart before a woman on a balcony who rubs a white towel across her face, in brick-coloured air, ochred air, wild as candlelight flickering in the smoke of cloves & incense, & world-weary men sit in a tiny shop under one dusty bulb like a dying ember, & boys sit in a silent circle, & one man who might be asleep sits cross-legged in the gloom, as if he were Eros himself settled on the soil, & you too sit knee-to-knee before the god who now holds the head of the city itself upright for you to examine its throat, the pulse on either side of the windpipe throbbing gently, & a cold white light emanates from just behind your head like an invitation into the familiar swirling dream where you walk the dark stairs, up or down is not clear, light of a cigarette sucked on by a shadowy face lighting the whole Kathmandu Valley, & the lord of death clown in blackface among, who won’t stop smiling over his frown.

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