Remember how we rode bicycles down Hijili Road swept by rain? It is that monsoon season again, when green things take wing. So in this delayed (only by a decade) letter I shall account for gain And loss again. Into which column falls your absence, or this thing: Emptiness felt as pain? Rain’s eyelets form and dissolve on the panes. Beyond lay the obscured years, and an anorak-ed postman who is seeking Me – another man without an address – somewhere in these foreign lanes. Did you finally write me that letter which will remind me of us talking All night? Or remind me of how you ached for atom’s laws, and I ached
For the asymptotic transcendence of words as trains snaked underneath
The copulas of fireflies, of stars? Postman waves, vanishes. Breached Years clearly won’t allow you rush in, excited, your head beneath A wet newspaper to tell me what new quarky dimension you have seen. Nor can I make you hear these horrid descants down which I have been.

Moths should learn to navigate darkness Since they so quickly find light. ~ Adam Zagajewski

Strangers kiss as softly as moths. ~ Michael Ontaadje

[1] I know there is some connection between These two lines and last night, when we Turned in for bed, and you turned to me as Believers turn to the body of a nailed messiah.

Yet it must have been the unseeing dark Covering us both, in which I sunk towards The depths where blue sunlight vanishes, For I failed to see your sounding hand.

[2] Unlearned in the art of navigating, By instinct, by sympathy, by faith, You must have collided against Night’s walls, unused oil lamps, Tables loaded with moldy feasts, Everything but what you sought. What was it you sought? Refuge In my body of embers? Light?

[3] So this morning, our spines greet Each other like adjacent tenement Houses, in whose shadows we must learn To kiss again, as softly and tentatively As strangers, as moths in the dark.

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god ~ J.L. Borges

[1] One dreams of what is Unattainable. Rain Outside spurns light. And inside, sleep feeds On memory’s slights.

[2] You surface again, my Severe Beatrice, in your Griffin drawn chariot, Eyes fixed heavenward, A lampshade of flame,

To demand that I confess To the sin of putting reason Above faith. I groan as I have done every time You passed by my side,

In the street, in the market, Neck craning in the direction Of your musk, eye eagerly Scanning the unruly mobs For your damasked gait.

[3] I have been eating from Damnation’s plate, and this city is A river full of raving monsters In whose company you appear. Don’t take this as proof that my

Love for God is greater than my Love for art, and that is greater Than my cursed love for you, for These three remain indivisible even As they appear to stand separate.

[4] Beatrice, we will meet again And always in the continuum Of life, which holds the words I write down on paper, which Holds the rain trickling down

The nape of your neck, The tree of salvation, The resurrection of time.