Walking towards a freshly painted house, its color a certain shade of blue, with patches of white still showing through, my nostrils flare and fill with turpentine fumes, whose scent soon grows indistinct as I drift away into evening light,

thinking this is how I approach you too, first thing after waking, you breath low and crackling with sleep, your body the hue of sky as it is breaks open with light, your scent of fruit, flaming in the half dark, a dawn firefly visible even before I touch you under the blanket -

O, why do I keep forgetting not to touch your dream wet body yet? Why do I keep wanting more than a certain sufficiency of sound, vision, and smell?

Which country's landscapes gives shape and color to our traveler, and his traveling dreams?

Does he wake like Tu Fu to watch frost, white on the ground, next to his bed, only to remember that

in the dream he was dreaming, the tree- lined road on which he was strolling or even the flowers on those trees

were from elsewhere? How does he discern these landscapes when they appear in his dreams? A backwards gaze

at a lit horizon receding from a speeding train window, with its spires of ruined temples, trussed bridges across a river

with a woman's name whom he might have once loved, sun-coaled shirtless peasants bent over yoked oxen,

tilling black clays like his grandfather, and grandfather's father, till a sudden proverb from one of his now unspoken languages

bursts like a tear or a bone from his skin: the washerman's dog belongs neither to the house nor to the ghat of the world?

A bird has flown through stone, heart stone, stone heart.

Now it bleeds through the cracks. It bleeds, I bleed with it.

Now passersby see blue sky through a bird window, a window in stone.