I sit at the table and across the distance, what measure should I invent to measure such distances?, is the chair angled to one side, left as you last sat in it, restoring to me your presence that I can only imagine and not sense, not sense but invoke, like an ancient sound

or an ancient memory: first of summer, because this is winter, of a koel singing at my window in a far away landscape and as my feet turn cold: another, of winter, fog rising from an exhaling earth that window becoming opaque and the koel's song being left to be remembered in wisps of smoke rising from blown candles and blown memories.

And in between these two memories, I am in a room of white curtains, I am standing behind them looking into where you sit, a single tress frames your angular face as it swings and sways a swing suspened from a pepul tree, the river flows, sound of breaking waves, and I am being risen towards a sky of blue, closer and closer but never reaching as the Laws, like gravity, that apply in exact measure, divide me between memories, divide memories between countries and divide countries within me, I am in one country, my memory in another and you have already left for another: across that distance, I can call but can't measure,(what measure should I use and what measure should I invent?)

And just as you place that tress back behind you ear, years will place back these moments of a recalled day's clarity into chambers of memory. I get up and straighten this angled chair which still remembers you, if only by how it is across the distance, across the table where we sat.

2002:12:22 23:30 Atlanta For Su

You came and left, and in between there is no evidence of yesterday.

On the desk a stray hair, longer than any hair of mine, on the bed the smell of your sweat.

Still I forgot so many details in just twelve hours and in twelve more I may even
forget about everything of your arrival and deprature.

Winter deepens and nights shorten very convinently, so that too much light may not impugn the dark or too much warmth may not thaw my freezing.

Darling, when your fingers touched me every prison of ice holding each cell of mine thawed and cried hot tears, remember their taste?

Darling, there are no signs left in this wintry landscape, where everything has been snowed in and everything left behind our old road atlas is only good for burning as roads have vanished.

Darling, when I see other eyes tonight, I would see those eyes alone, it no longer, is as those days, when I saw your sad eyes in all other eyes.

Now you have to come and not leave so that of everything in between, I may forget, so that of everything in between, I might see,

I still, may remember your warmth, imprisoned in sad ice and still keep your sad eyes, as some evidence of yesterday.

2002:12:16 15:30 Atlanta

On remembering lines of Agha Shahid Ali's ghazal:

He's freed some fire from ice, in pity for Heaven; he's left open-for God-the doors of Hell tonight.