When I revisit places where I had lived for sometime, after a gap of months or years, what hurts my eye most is the disappearance of trees - like a a visual and psychological vacuum - in whose shade I might have read in, or around whose rough trunks I might have played games, or those with branches I have climbed and spent time hanging off. Perhaps I am like that hermit Kiran Desi mentions in an interview as the inspiration for her first novel, the one who (in my case, at least, visually) gives up the land, and moves to live high up in a tree. In the highly infrequent visits to my parents' house in India, I find myself missing the coconut trees in the front yard, whose lifespan proved to be less enduring than mine. And in the gentrifying neck of woods on the North East Shore where I current live, I miss the green sea that is Atlanta from ground up, and from air.

So when I returned to the Cave here in Atlanta tonight, I felt something missing in the dark, like a memory that is looking for its house. And then realized the cause of this sensation was a tree - a seventy five year old oak - which was gone, which was cut down. I suppose losses such as familiar trees disappearing are perhaps are less minor than other losses we encounter in life, for example,lovers vanishing from the rooms of the heart, for sure I did not feel the same intensity of emotion, not the same number of poems with them at the central muse, when they were around. But while those latter love-lorn holes at the center make us, perhaps, more picturesque, more amenable to the days that follow, the sharpness of long I felt standing outside in the yard here makes me think, whether those former losses - a tree felled from a remember landscape - are as serious even if they are like the pages of an old and loved book getting frayed, dog-eared, coming loose from the spine?