A single violin and a sequence of notes. Another winter night in another winter. How to Name It, an album that I have been lugging with me since I was a kid, 1986 I think. An appropriate tape to play as I try to fashion the image of my soul on blank sheets of paper, the music rising and falling, as old and as familiar as the cold outside. Before I say it shouldn't be this way, I realise things are how they should be, each note perfect as in this sad fugue, two violins talking to one another, one questioning and one answering, without a pause. Within me too there are two violins, only the violinists are out, perhaps talking a walk in the sky. Today when I saw the downtown spires hidden by the mist, I thought how would it be if one can just step off from a builiding, say fifteth floor and take a walk in those mists. I suspect my violinists are walking in those mists now, very silently.

Winters have to be, by decree, silent. The only sound that is permitted is the sound of pen ruslting over paper or the sound of the type writer keys making their music. I will also permit myself music, nothing frivilous, no dance music but music in which each note is distinct like cuts on my chapped lips, and as sharp. Years roll on by, today someone said I am too mature for my age. I should have told her that it's winter, which paints everything in somber tones, teal or the color of dusky wine. And in these somber landscapes,I imagine a snow covered field and over that memories fliting like birilliant butterflies. Maybe if I should have peeled open my irises like an egg and showed her these memories, sartling images,maybe she would have understood. No perhaps, just startling for me, for in the commnality of human experience startling is shared too and that makes it a common memory. Take this one for example: the feel of lips meeting cold lips.

This is my third winter, I won't be breaking into a song like Nat King Cole: "I dream of a White Christmas". I remember my first snow fall in the first winter in the first world. I woke up to a sublight dawn and snow flakes were falling. There was so much beauty and I stood at that window watching a swing suspended from an oak tree, fill silently with snow. I was too enstranged from the woman in my life then, too much filled with disquiet to write a poem or a haiku like Basho. Listen to what he says:

"The first soft snow! Enough to bend the leaves Of the jonquil low."

I was bent low with a fear of being left alone, scampering like a field mouse on that field of snow, lost. I had pushed myself too hard and her too. She left me, the last conversation ending with that last click of a phone crashing and then static on the line. She had enough of my madness and my fumbling passions, swinging from music to poetry to hiking to sailing alone in the Pacific, in my version of Kon Tiki. We never spoke after that.

On this silent winter night as thoughts go out to that morning and to her, I wonder what lessons did that winter teach? To learn how to bend and accept the measure of sorrow and extinguished dreams? And my pen grows silent lost in these questions. The violins now begin to sing "You Can't Be Free". But they too must die as do these memories of the first snow.

"Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die."

So wrote Basho about cicadas and me.

At the periphery of my sleep, breaking waves is an emotion I have become a stranger to.

It looks like simple joy and on touch moves that way too, in simple steps down the street.

It opens the door, enters with -out knocking and stands at my bed waiting for me to awake.

What shape is it, what seamless form? Is it like sweet wine swirling over my senses of smell and taste?

Or is it like a flower, a dogwood tree in bloom, little stars like snow that line the avenues in my wintry dreams?

I don't know, I don't know and I call out, my eyes closed, "Who goes there?". And then it vanishes into

the night, walks into a door into which I can't enter, not tonight, not right away: like a red woman who has left me now with

thoughts of wine, flowers and discontinous sleep.

2002:12:12 23:30 Atlanta