[1] Writing is also a way of exorcism, These tongs or toothpicks of words Poking and prodding at all that is hidden Out into the clear light of the day.

[2] I hear your voice play like a blacksmith's Hammer striking the hoop of a wagon wheel Not yet fully formed or fitted on its frame of wood, Still red, and hissing as it sinks into my blood.

[3] I finish reading a page and turn to the next, Not wanting to leave it behind, and at the same time Wanting to go into the next inviting room, to lay My cheek against the coolness of a new floor and gaze At the trompe l'oeil you might have painted for a roof, Hanging over blank note paper like Michelangelo.

[4] Jealousy spurts and flares, and colors my throat blue. I become Neeladri, one who swallowed the primordial Poison before drinking amrita. Learning a lover's history Is like that, even though it is irrelevant, even though I Knows I can't ever possess you totally or at all. Yet this body Wishes it was what was between your arms as you danced, Instead, with that perfect stranger, for only once in your life.

[5] I must have met you somewhere before. Your face looks familiar. Weren't you the shadow Who paused on the bank of Neva in Dostoevsky's White Nights, (which I feverishly read, hidden under A blanket, with a flashlight in my mouth, away From the Cheka eyes of my mother for whom All Russians were communists out to radicalize me), Waiting for her lover to arrive?

You must have shut the book and placed It by your red radio (it must have been late) Before I could hail you from over there, That country of monsoon afternoons.