The Anatomy of the Primordial

The estuary of time meanders into the timeless abyss

 Shesha, the void-eyed serpent of a thousand faces,

Slithers this way and that, across the waves as I, Vishnu

The order of the universe, the witness of the beginning

And the prophet of the culmination, breathe out the cosmos

Upon these waterless oceans of nothing.

The coronary clock-hands of the nothing

Continue to strike the hours into the abyss

As the blue-boned, circadian mind of the cosmos

Sloughs off its latest rage. Those cotton-clouded faces!

Those ambrosia-mottled limbs of devalok are beginning

To seize and choke my being! No, No, cries Vishnu.

But the gods, the leaves, the shoals and the fires are also Vishnu.

I am the nameless, the limbless; the solitary sailor of the nothing.

The synapses of each moment wreathe my end to my beginning

While I cannot die, I must give birth and blossom into this abyss.

The umbilical lotus springs out, bleeding immortality onto the faces

Of the four-headed Brahma, the son and the keeper of my cosmos.

Brahma, as he is born, excavates the suns and the jupiters out of the cosmos

He tills out the moons, earths, comets till the Milky Way gushes out of Vishnu.

I, Vishnu, the king and the steward, breed continually till I am a thousand faces.

I am the wild boar and the vast shell of the tortoise, and the life-giving nothing.

I, my lotus-son and the serpent are both the ouroborous and the abyss,

We are the map of the apocalypse woven into each dewdrop of the beginning.

Matsya, the piscean lord, gave me his form to wear at the crisis of the beginning.

I remember his immense lamellar bones, his lobed fins; his tail rips the cosmos

Like ice. I lived and blessed his fragile, scaled body, and still it lurks the abyss

Around the sub-Himalayan landform. For a mortal body to house the Vishnu

Is great suffering: from the king of kings he has become a near-extinct nothing

They call him the coelacanth for his hollow spine – the spine he lost for my faces.

As the ocean bed retched up the ambrosia and the venom, the greedy faces

Of a million demigods slobbered upon my shores. I saw then the beginning

Of bloodspill: they would all suffer and nothing would come of this mad nothing.

Vishnu, then unbecome, took off his cyan-scaled skin. He turned the cosmos

Into a stage lit by a million suns. He became the aniconic, courtesan-Vishnu

To lure and thwart, swerve and sway those who must fall and be eaten by the abyss.

In the boundless midnight abyss,

The trinity reigns in the name of Vishnu

And so shall, till the culmination of the cosmos.