Maate Manthramu, on the occasion of a festival not celebrated.

It has been many springs now, Adrienne, and here I find myself in a rain swept city, staring at a shock of forsythia out of a window - how we travel with our bottle glass hearts from room to room, holding them out to lovers who we know - somewhere - like thunder - will leave -

the why, and how might differ but the end remains the same - a trace of remembered fires among cold sheets, and the echo - no, less than an echo - perhaps just a memory of someone - you - humming a jazz tune - something about flowers in spring showers - many rooms down in mind's bleak corridors.

In parks overseen by stern men of bird-shit brass, the blue of hyacinth and the red daub of tulips breaking the deep yellows - Vincent never painted

• in Dutchland perhaps has none of? - these daffodils bent down in the rain - a gray from which mousy forms peel off to scurry underground. In this city of millions when spring actually comes who will sing Walt's song? Walt is dead - the apartment upstairs is dark - and I must migrate to the city that inhabits the shadow of Radhika's breast. But where is Radhika, under which shroud? Birdsong and the streak of mating cardinals among the dogwoods -- earth fills my mouth, air breathes my bones, I am but a minstrel of the unthawed cold, half held but also half cast out of her heaven, which pulses red like a hummingbird's throat.

04/04/2008, New York City