a blue lightning of laughter, he remembers Ghalib:

"vuh gul jis gulsitāñ meñ jalvah-farmāʾī kare ġhālib chaṭaknā ġhunchah-e gul kā ṣadā-e ḳhandah-e dil hai"

In the garden in which that rose grants us audience, Ghalib, The opening-burst of the rosebud is the sound of heart's laughter.

I miss the friendship with the pine tree and the birds I had when I was ten. And it has been forever since I pushed my head under the wild silk skirt of the waterfall.

What I had with them was tender and private. The lake was practically my girlfriend. I carried her picture in my front shirt pocket. Even in my sleep, I heard the sound of water.

The big rock on the shore was the skull of a dead king whose name we could almost remember. Under the rooty bank you could dimly see the bunk beds of the turtles.

Maybe twice had I said a girl's name to myself; I had not yet had my weird first dream of money.

Nobody I know mentions these things anymore. It's as if their memories have been seized, erased, and relocated among flow charts and complex dinner party calendars.

Now I want to turn and run back the other way barefoot into the underbrush, getting raked by thorns, being slapped in the face by branches.

Down to the muddy bed of the little stream where my cupped hands make a house, and

I tilt up the roof to look at the face of the frog.

Note: At the end of a day spent wrestling with "flow charts", he secretively reads poetry magazines (this one April/ March issue of The American Poetry Review), and tries to let poems take him back to places including lakes, and creatures, whose memories are going faint in his brain, just like the wetness of water just dispersed from the tongue on a hot summer day.