Flying Garuda over Java

On the early morning flight
from Jakarta to Surabaya
secure a seat at a starboard window.

Edge out of the night
and contemplate one of nature’s
most sublime spectacles,

what Burke put in another dimension,
before the clouds throw themselves
together out of modesty

and constitute what Aldous Huxley
called ‘white islands’,
crags of volcanic condensation

(while trying to forget
Garuda’s record of aviation
disasters and hardware problems –

Garuda waking
in an enamelled pavilion
high in the branches of the world-tree –

Garuda the serpent-destroyer,
whose wings when flying
chant the Veda).

These are the twenty cones of Java.
They could be those of Io,
mooning around Jupiter –

and a little farther away
Bromo and Semeru
swimming in their violet haze.

All of them sacred sites
on the most densely populated
island in the world,

caldera demanding appeasement
from the anger-managers –
even volcanoes want to live on surplus.

*
And the file of tourists
trudging through the sand seas
round the Tengger crater

to Lava View Lodge
and the lakes of turquoise sulphur
have to register their impact:

lotus-swimming nymphs,
Buddha smiling in his rotunda,
all the pavilions of our civilised acts

have been built cheek-by-jowl
with the natural terrors
we mean to escape.