He opens his eyes to a hard frost, the morning's soft amnesia of snow.

The thorned stems of gorse are starred crystal; each bud like a candied fruit, its yellow picked out and lit by the low pulse of blood-orange riding in the eastern trees.

What the snow has furred to silence, uniformity, frost amplifies, makes singular: giving every form a sound, an edge, as if frost wants to know what snow tries to forget.

And so he drinks for winter, for the coming year, to open all the beautiful tiny doors in their craquelure of frost; and he drinks like the snow falling, trying to close the biggest door of all.

That he is a fool, he himself readily (too readily perhaps?) admits, and this, he says, is why he entangles himself over and over in the barbed wire of desire like a mangy rabid dog, and waters the prickly cacti of silences, with the ensuing muck.

This, if his word is to be believed, has been going on for years, this wandering between various Romes and Jerusalems, with the foolish hope that he will be blinded by light, that he will be the author of (and not just stage fodder in), a divine comedy.

But we know, realistically speaking, Beatrices are far few in between. So his claims that you came close, you know you should heavily discount. What were you then but a young girl singing songs by the fishing nets, and he but a delirious beach bum?

You have a life now, hard as the diamond nose ring you were given for your wedding. And this should prove for you once & all the kind of foolishness this man is made of, when he tells me, "Tell Kannamma, I still have her song even if I have forgotten my way to that house, in that world."