It is sometime in the night. And I am shuffling through discs, a quick succession of sounds; first a haunting chant like composition for violin called Tabula Rasa by Arvo Pärt, a Estonian composer, then over to Frank Sinatra and his smoky love songs, and finally because of resignation or laziness, Faiz’s ghazals in Abida’s voice. Some how no music seems to be right tonight. I lie on my back and watch thoughts swim up and down my spine like goldfish. Ideas for poems, images from a country that can’t be redeemed or retrieved, lists of words that are beautiful and intimate, then common objects and Neruda’s odes to them: knife, spoon, lemon, salt, wine.

Then it occurs to me that I should write an ode to Messengers. I think of what I will say of that pixel-ed panel though which one receives everything – laughter, sound, feeling, facts, information, opinions, questions, concern - warped in text, in grammars of language. However this is just a description of what happens, a tip of the iceberg. What lies behind, inside, and hidden, how does one get to that? How does one unearth that?

Perhaps one can’t. One is tied. Fingers, tendrils, roots of words only span a minute distance of what lies between two ideas, two kinds of consciousness. I should know this better than most, having lost – yes, even though as Elizabeth Bishop maintains losing as an art is not hard to master, and neither does it end in disaster – friends of many years, friends I knew as flesh and blood, as raucous laughter, as tears, as embraces, behind those fogs of words, which reduce voices to mere echoes. And finally even the echoes stop. It too hard, too painful perhaps, to carry on talking, gossiping in such disembodied fashion.

And then separate realities always are waiting once the power, the grove of cyberia, is switched off, with each one’s reality just slipping into the neighborhood of fable, in the comprehension of the other. Sympathy, in any case, is a meager diet, especially when one is looking from the other for an intuitive and deep understanding of the cards that life is dealing to him on the poker table. An understanding that can only come if one can show and act on love one profess to have for the other. Love, a complex many headed beast no doubt, but which is surely not identical to the English word 'love', contaminated by its traces.

Yet, how strong is the human impulse to communicate, to broadcast news of the self to the world, to elicit perfect understanding, to pull a blanket of talk over the hours, to forget the gaps that start just where the skin ends! Thus cursed or blessed, one has to keep navigating between the self and the other, the exterior and the interior, keep piloting the tugboat of life between the gulfs of words, of worlds.

[1] The passing storm had knocked Over an oak on the power lines.

So here we are, with pen and paper, With breath and word, with each other, Bone racked and marooned in a pool Of candlelight. Write. Write to

Remember the others who have kept Watch over the stations of the night, Stations through which desire keeps Steaming in and out, rarely carrying Us out, intact, into the hours of light.

Attempt baby-sleep. Attempt monk-prayer. Attempt a philosopher’s knowing grimace. No. None of these would help except that Which is not permitted to living. Death.

[2] The candlewick is soon swamped In its mutable wax. It dips its head. A smoky light, and then nearly goes Dark as if it were road-kill whimpering, Waiting to be put out of its misery.

Soon however a breach in the thinned Crater, at whose center the shrouded flame Continued to breathe. Then tears that Harden even as they drip and pool.

Resurrection follows. The wick stands again, The comb of a rooster rising from a shortened Neck, and crowing in the dark. You, restored to Vision, attempt to write down what it has to say

July 11. 2005 Hurricane Dennis passing overhead

Moths should learn to navigate darkness Since they so quickly find light. ~ Adam Zagajewski

Strangers kiss as softly as moths. ~ Michael Ontaadje

[1] I know there is a connection between These two lines and last night when we Turned in for bed, and you turned to me as Believers turn to the body of a nailed messiah.

Yet it must have been the unseeing dark Covering us both, in which I sunk towards The depths where blue sunlight vanishes, That I failed to notice your sounding hand.

[2] Unlearned in the art of navigating By instinct, by sympathy, by faith, You must have collided against Night’s walls, unused oil lamps, Tables loaded with moldy feasts, Everything but what you sought. What was it you sought? Refuge In my body of embers? Light?

[3] So this morning, our spines greet Each other like adjacent tenement Houses, in whose shadows we must learn To kiss again, as softly and as tentatively As strangers, as moths in the dark.