Yudhiṣṭhira and the Yakṣa

The forest floor shot up like the
The hypotenuse of a right-angle triangle;
Death-pale trees, like white house fronts, slid by on either side.
Much like our days of exile gone by, and more
Days of exile to come:
Each as like the other, as its own face in the mirror -
(Which the Red Door really was, hanging 'twixt the trees and infinity) - and then, 

The Demon Bird, stock still
on one long thin leg, cocking its wily head at the fish in the water rimmed
By withered sedge, (what rotting
Fen is this? Oozing with moss and slime, the air Thick with pestilential vapours,
And lying there, death staring from their cold, hard eyes!
Ah! Woe is me and my splitting head!
All my brothers??)
Clacked its pointed bill:
"Who or what is weightier than the Earth?
Reply truly: even as thou hast stepped through the Red Door, so must thou heed my word, thou puny mortal!
Or thou shalt die
here and now, beside this very lake,
Of a thirst that no water in heaven, hell or earth can slake!"

And there and then, I began (eyes tight open, in stark concentration)
To shake, tremble, quake, like luminous jellyfish in the sky, with shocking, uncontrollable
Laughter.
(Truth be told, being browbeaten by a water fowl,
When your brothers lie dead in the mud:     Could things be more hysterical?!)

"Aha! Thou knowest not the answer!
O Yudhiṣṭhira, the Wise!
Prepare thou for death, for thus shalt thou
Rejoin thy beloved siblings,
who, in their supreme folly,
ignored my injunction!"

Choking still with boundless mirth,
"To die, ever unprepared, is man, O Bird!" quoth I,
"Drowning every moment
in the sights and sounds of death, (wonder of wonders!)
He perpetuates this absurd fiction of life!
To what he owes this bizarre addiction is
A mystery to me.
And, who is so foolish that
He knoweth not :
She who bears Life in her womb,
Is borne down by her own weight, O mighty Yakṣa?
Or, if I have recognised indeed,
Father, I presume?"