At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous,
Full of mouths and eyes, feet, thighs and bellies,
Terrible with fangs, O master,
All the worlds are fear-struck, even just as I am.
When I see you, Vishnu, omnipresent,
Shouldering the sky, in hues of rainbow,
With your mouths agape and flame-eyes staring-
All my peace is gone; my heart is troubled.

Act II is peppered with a repeated refrain from Pasqualita, the Oppenheimer’s Tewa Indian housemaid. The text comes from a traditional Tewa song:

In the north the cloud-flower blossoms
And now the lightning flashes
And now the thunder clashes
And now the rain comes down! A-a-aha, a-a-aha, my little one.
In the west the cloud-flower blossoms
And now the lightning flashes
And now the thunder clashes
And now the rain comes down! A-a-aha, a-a-aha, my little one.

And now the rain comes down! A-a-aha, a-a-aha, my little one.

One of the only scenes of actual connection (though still full of loneliness and longing) is Baudelaire’s “A Hemisphere in Your Hair” is used verbatim in the scene w/ Kitty Oppenheimer:

A Hemisphere in Your Hair

Long, long let me breathe the fragrance of your hair. Let me plunge my face into it like a thirsty man into the water of a spring, and let me wave it like a scented handkerchief to stir memories in the air.

If only you knew all that I see! all that I feel! all that I hear in your hair! My soul voyages on its perfume as other men’s souls on music.

Your hair holds a whole dream of masts and sails; it holds seas whose monsoons waft me toward lovely climes where space is bluer and more profound, where fruits and leaves and human skin perfume the air.

In the ocean of your hair I see a harbor teeming with melancholic songs, with lusty men of every nation, and ships of every shape, whose elegant and intricate structures stand out against the enormous sky, home of eternal heat.

In the caresses of your hair I know again the languors of long hours lying on a couch in a fair ship’s cabin, cradles by the harbor’s imperceptible swell, between pots of flowers and cooling water jars.

On the burning hearth of your hair I breathe in the fragrance of tobacco tinged with opium and sugar; in the night of your hair I see the sheen of the tropic’s blue infinity’ on the shores of your hair I get drunk with the smell of musk and tar and the oil of coconuts.
Long, long, let me bite your black and heavy tresses. When I gnaw your elastic and rebellious hair I seem to be eating memories.

The best You Tube clip I could find was from the Amsterdam performance so the subtitles are in Dutch. The stage at the Met was more impressive (in my opinion) in the vertical dynamics. Is nevertheless worth checking out this clip, to get a sense..