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ठ

ṬH

Twelfth consonant of the Sanskrit alphabet
(pronounced like an English “t,” but with the tongue curled
back, touching the roof of the mouth,
with a puff of air.)

Few words begin with ṭh.
Sir Monier Monier-Williams’s Sanskrit-English dictionary (1891) says
the letter itself stands for
“a loud noise,”
“(ṭhaṭham ṭhaṭham ṭhaṃ ṭhaṭham ṭhaṭham ṭhaḥ,
an imitative sound, as of a golden pitcher rolling down steps.)”

Also: the moon’s disk, a disk, a cypher, a place frequented by all, the deity Śiva.

But after
ṭhaṭham ṭhaṭham ṭhaṃ ṭhaṭham ṭhaṭham ṭhaḥ,
sound of a golden pitcher rolling down steps,
what else is needed for a poem?
A world clamors out of the image—
a palace in sun, women in saris, brahmins talking in alcoves, servants attending guests,
workers repairing a viaduct.

A sound echoes out a lost world,
a dead language.
A golden pitcher rolling, tumbling, banging,
ringing,
stopping at your feet.
You pick up the pitcher.
You speak the sound out loud.

त

TA

The fifteenth consonant of the Sanskrit alphabet
(pronounced like the English “t,” with the tongue
touching the back of the teeth).

Sir Monier Monier-Williams’s 1891 Sanskrit-English dictionary
devotes thirty-four pages to words beginning with त.
I stop on tat,
which,
as a relative, demonstrative, correlative pronoun, means:
“that.”

As a word, it
barely holds water.
Think of
that.

Thus,
in scripture, it stands for God,
Brahman, the Ground of Being
beyond words, beyond knowing.
Hence, the mantra:
tat tvam asi.
“Thou art That.”

And in a Buddhist dictionary, I find the word,
tathātā:
“suchness.”
“The exact inimitable quality of this moment as it is.”

In Genesis:
Ehyeh asher ehyeh,

I am
that
I am.

Then, in the fourteenth-century, Meister Eckhart in wrote:

“When I yet stood in my first cause, I had no God and was my own cause:
then I wanted nothing and desired nothing,
for I was bare being and the knower of myself in the enjoyment of truth. . . .
But when I . . . received my created being, then I had a God.
For before there were creatures, God was not ‘God.’

He was

That

which

He

was.”

tat tvam asi.

छ
CH
-- for Joseph Sowder

Seventh consonant of the Sanskrit alphabet
(pronounced, “cha,” with a puff or air).
In Sir Monier Monier-Williams’s 1891Sanskrit-
English dictionary,
I stop on the word,
chāyā:
“shade, shadow, luster, beauty.”

Once,
the wife of the Sun ran away from home, leaving her shadow,
chāyā, to care for the children.
(We are the children.)

Dear Joe,

Remember the October night you pulled up to the trailhead sometime after ten for our backpack in the Smokies? You’d come away from your raging wife (dead, now, ten years). We packed our packs and headed out, hiking the high ridges of the AT in the earth’s shadow toward Ice Water Springs. Moonlight, starlight, lit our way, lit the rose quartz of the mountains. Subalpine firs stood around like holiday trees, like wilderness guards, fathers, grey ferns bowing at their feet.

For seven days, we sweetened our lunches with huckleberries, sitting on the shaded cliffs of Charlie’s Bunion, Chimney Rock, Spence Field, gazing out on our favorite views, and bathed in the ice water falls.

It was a return to childhood, to days free in summer, when we lit out after breakfast for Mount Airy Forest, geared up with pocketknives, binoculars, Diamond matches, Winston cigarettes, all lifted from Dad’s dresser drawers. We started fires and wildly stamped them out, Winston’s dangling from our gangster mouths. We waded cold creeks, snagging crawfish, tadpoles, leaping frogs and garter snakes. And then, as the sun went down, we hurried home, slipping in under the fence of our Dad’s trip-wire anger.

A year older than me, you were the better batter, better pitcher, kid-mechanic with radios, motorcycles, cars. And the girls loved you best. When Mom pulled up to Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic School, at least one girl squealed, There’s Joe Sowder! There’s Joe Sowder! We fought, too, like brothers, in that Homeric, Darwinian daylight of boyhood. But then one day, like watching a sun going down, I saw there never really was anything to fight about.

Tonight, on a cliff above Logan Canyon, my body, the limestone, aspens and firs gleam in moonlight. In the halflight, the starlight, I think we see more clearly. Mom and Dad are gone. Aunt Eileen, our family saint, is gone. Our childhood homes, our childhoods. I close my eyes and enter the great silence, a place like cool shadow, the home we never leave, and where from each other we never part.

ळ
LĪ

The tenth vowel of the Sanskrit alphabet.

Sir Monier Monier-Williams 1891 Sanskrit-English dictionary says this letter is
“entirely artificial and only appearing in the works of some grammarians and lexicographers.”

There is no letter lī.

Still, Monier Monier-Williams lists these meanings

A name of Śiva.
The mother of the wish-fulfilling cow,
kāmadhenū,
who grants all desires and incarnates as terrestrial cows.

The gods live in her body.
Her legs are the vedas, the four scriptures.
Her horns the Trimurti (Trinity).
Her eyes shine as the sun and moon.
Her shoulders hold the Fire-God Agni and the Wind-God Vayu.

This cow, this letter, this mother, this poem,
arise from nothing, ऴ,
the place where nothing takes place
and everything is born.
Let us sing,
Oṃ Namaḥ Kāmadhenave.