Reading bits of Verghese’s “The Tennis Partner” makes me remember my friendships from the past days. And then that makes me sad every time I read it. I don’t know where the sadness comes from, probably from a sense of identification with this person, David, he writes about. David is a cocaine addict and a medical student whom Verghese befriends in El Paso. He later becomes Verghese’s tennis partner and friend with perhaps each man needing another equally: Verghese with the end of his marriage and David as he struggles to keep away from crack and to maintain the few bonds he manages to forge with others, sometimes all too desperately. Perhaps the larger sadness comes from the fact that David dies in the end after he shoots himself in the face. This larger pain that seems to be untenable and unbearable and this other larger pain we leave in others as we flail around trying to escape, seems to be all too familiar to my own.

I went out for a walk after I wrote the above paragraph. Now Glenn Gould is playing Bach’s Fugues behind me on the piano. I imagine his fingers moving up and down the keys, black and white, teasing beauty out of air. Sometimes when I walk, I wish for a walking partner, even though often I am content to be alone with my solitude. This is mainly to point out the details I observe around me. Today I saw a butterfly, about two inches wide, striped like a tiger, black markings on orange-ish background hovering over some petunias. And then further down, I saw that a pine tree, from which a swing had hung over a small creek, had disappeared. I suppose it must have been struck by a recent thunderstorm. The weather outside is perfect this evening without being too humid. I nodded to a few people who were walking back home, I suppose from the university. And someone else was applying black pain to a chain link fence. A crow was cawing in the trees, probably signaling my return home.

Walking away from home my thoughts were again back to the recent traumas, the questions of why and how, trying to explain things to myself obsessively even though I now know that no explanation would be satisfactory enough. How to frame reasons for someone else’s actions when my own actions often seem to be driven by reasons which are unreasonable? Well so I left those thoughts alone and walked on further.

And on the return I was thinking about my various motivations behind taking all these roads only much later to where I had started out, sort of shifting through these mental thought process. One common reason had been a fascination for the unknown. Someone, I don’t remember who, once remarked that I seem to arrive at the point of being fascinated and then infatuated with people very quickly. I suppose in hindsight that is both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is that such a perception enables me to see what is of fundamental beauty in someone else. Perhaps the blame rests on the poet’s psyche, which seeks to amplify these certain shimmer things to a whole light. This for one, either makes the other person feel nice but if they are wary of strangeness, because all poetry comes from strange unmapped places, feel extremely cautious. I have sometimes met people only once in very strange ways and written poems of that experience. To borrow Dylan Thomas’s terms, that was my raging against the dark night. This I think is also the duty of poetry, to net the essential essence of all beauty and wretchedness of life.

The danger as I see it is that however this also means that I end up seeing only what I want to see and then projecting my own imagined notions on the other person. This obviously doesn’t add up in time and sometimes leads to disappointments of various degree.

The violin begs, how it begs, the god. It’s an old raga now, one I have memorized. I find myself humming it at odd times: Running sprints up the hills, arms pumping air, not unlike a violinist teasing wood.

The other day I was trying to explain Something about something, maybe love, To a girl, when this raga came up and stole My tongue. I kept chasing it in circles Like a dog chasing its tail. It was fun.

She even laughed, I haven’t seen her laugh Much before. So I became even funnier But I bet the god didn’t think so. Why the very next day, he cut my tail and Made me whimper in pain all night.

I then joined the violin in its begging.

Time is distance, but forgetting is closer at hand. Stick words to your windows, obscure the view, that is already vanishing behind you.

Take that snow, see how it falls over another year, of time and of distance. That is a poem too, hard and cold to the hand. Frostbitten words nip at you even as they stem the larger pain, don't they?

Bear that as delicately as you have borne love. Be a squirrel, warm the words with your body. Eat those kernels as food on these bleak days and hold a few as seed for next spring.

...

Then distant in time, for time is distance, you can unpeel these wind gnawed and water blurred words and sow them with your flowers or feed them to the swans.

Just write!