In a field speckled with the last of the cone flowers, and grass Bending to rust, I gaze at This city's unchanging steel and Its caged ambition - and before its Doorstep the ever mutable sea.

It is these borderlands I inhabit - Serving at Mammon's temple and Stealing into Mnemosyne's vestibule, As I wait for the winter's breath To unloosen me from my green Fever, and make me as naked

As the aquamarine nestled against                              Radhika's throat.

Splash into one another as their pails Rattle and shake in my bone-house. Sometimes memory takes me to distant Adrienne, with her taste for grandeur, And sometimes to Radhika, who stands Close by, whispering something tender, Even though sometimes I get confused, And wonder who is who, and what Color is whose banner. Neither are, And are, because these word fragments Shaped into markers of longing for each

Abound. But sometimes when I open My ancient notebooks to read A foreign tongue with a foreign tongue (It changes as the mouths it kisses change) - From their shape they appear like - Few words, lot of empty space at the margins - Not very different from those nights When trees try to invade with their trashing Shadows, and fingers trace a vanished shape, Marginal, her(I can't give her a name) Throat in full laughter perhaps - the poem That had no memoirst at hand to record.

If home is found on both sides of the globe, Home is of course here - and always a missed land. ~ Agha Shahid Ali

You will not be the first engineer to get a green card, Says a stranger to him, drinking beer and thinking of dactyls gone missing.

Do you intend to return? The economy over there is booming. Tell me then why I, in memory, return only to the chor bazaars?

What do you feel about the power dynamics of hired help? Love mostly - mixed with guilt of forgetting her, with whom I learned the art of planting tomatoes.

Why did you come here tonight, in this missed land? Because of This desire to hear an afsana laugh across a crowded room.

What is wabi-sabi? It is the art of abandonment that I am trying here, in attempting to make this thing of commonplace beauty.