The heart is a restless beast tonight, much like a ravenous lion in the Roman circuses, and I am attempting to tame it with morsels of sound from that close cousin of Hindustani Classical music, Persian classical music. This is the music I am listening to.

...

Later, I discovered that MusicIndiaOnline (which I think, hands down, is the best Indian music site!) has the very beautiful album "Rain" by Ghazal, the Indo-Persian duo comprised of Iranian kamancheh (spike fiddle) player Kayhan Kalhor and Indian sitarist Shujaat Husain Khan. You may be interested in the liner notes from an earlier Ghazal's album for a quick rundown on these two musicial traditions.

Things get broken at home like they were pushed by an invisible, deliberate smasher. It's not my hands or yours It wasn't the girls with their hard fingernails or the motion of the planet. It wasn't anything or anybody It wasn't the wind It wasn't the orange-colored noontime Or night over the earth It wasn't even the nose or the elbow Or the hips getting bigger or the ankle or the air. The plate broke, the lamp fell All the flower pots tumbled over one by one. That pot which overflowed with scarlet in the middle of October, it got tired from all the violets and another empty one rolled round and round and round all through winter until it was only the powder of a flowerpot, a broken memory, shining dust.

And that clock whose sound was the voice of our lives, the secret thread of our weeks, which released one by one, so many hours for honey and silence for so many births and jobs, that clock also fell and its delicate blue guts vibrated among the broken glass its wide heart unsprung.

Life goes on grinding up glass, wearing out clothes making fragments breaking down forms and what lasts through time is like an island on a ship in the sea, perishable surrounded by dangerous fragility by merciless waters and threats.

Let's put all our treasures together -- the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold -- into a sack and carry them to the sea and let our possessions sink into one alarming breaker that sounds like a river. May whatever breaks be reconstructed by the sea with the long labor of its tides. So many useless things which nobody broke but which got broken anyway.

Pablo Neruda wrote many odes to many elemental things such as an onion, a dictionary, a telescope, a suit etc. But he forgot to write one for the glance, an ode for which I need to read tonight. So I sit here at my table, pen poised over paper, priming the gears of the mind, the engines of the heart, hunting to say something simple about the glance, only to return to a dream that woke me up this morning, that dream of passing by a glance at a café, doubling back, back stepping to check if this was the glance, the glance that I seem to be on a chase for some time now, a glance hanging from the tip of an eye getting into a railway compartment, a glance caught sideways across a room in which someone is teasing a raga from his throat, a glance encountered when one eye flutters open for a second during lovemaking and the other eye receives it like the mouth of a postbox, a glance at dusk reflected in a shop’s display window, a glance crossing the road at a zebra crossing or zipping by in a car in the opposite direction, a glance that will blanket the open eye like sleep or forgetting, that glance whose glance I am chasing with this meager net of words like a butterfly in an endless field of insomnias.