He opens a page, a vein of wood, and writes in royal blue, of the blues, distracted by the fires heaped on sidewalks.

Every tree is an omen, a burning bush, and every line written under their undressing shadows, a journey back to sunlit rooms in which Adrienne's

hair veined the white snows of beds, across the splayed cities of a continent. He should be fleeing such devastation, and the winters that trot at its heels.

Yet he keeps looking back, again and again, thinking he can hold on to autumn's crimson in its passing, forgetting his fates are those of Orpheus's lot or Lot's wife.

"“Are you carrying anything that could be dangerous to the other passengers?”At this Shahid clapped a hand to his chest and cried: “Only my heart.” ~ Amitav Ghosh in "The Ghat of the Only World”: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn"

After nearly two years spent living in a cube 5x5 ft , he is migrating to a bigger cube. And this means a hallway lined with cardboard boxes - with grocery store labels "Huggies Natural Fit", "Keebler Cookie Crunch" etc drowning out his inscriptions - containing nearly all his movable (& extremely heavy) wealth, i.e., books.

There is melancholy in the empty room - dusty shelves standing empty. And a question as to whether the arc of his journey from that arrival with two suitcases, revolving round and round on a baggage carousel in a airport (even they had books - two each of fiction and poetry) to this departure (or displacement?) eight years later, with its five hundred or so books in twenty odd boxes, makes any sense?

He once wanted to read all these books (and hopefully write better as a result) but he hasn't made the effort to do so as yet. Why not? And so this question now burns on its fuse inside, and will continue to do so before inertia and time do their work. Outside a fine rain falls, autumn is at hand again. And these are the things he carries as he lifts and places in the boxes the last of his books.