Note: I saw this cello concerto (Dvorak's very famous and recognizable one) performed last night in an Upper West Side church, here in New York, and for a brief while, I could exile the turbulence of my interior, and be alive to the coming of spring (it has already come in the American South where I have been spending time recently).

Afterwards, a night of drinking followed, and a walk back home in a cold cutting wind. Ye weather gods, can be done with winter please?

It must be spring - yes, it must be spring that makes his heart remember the heat of her pale hand touching it as sun thawed a great lake by which they sat - and by which they will never sit again - yes, it must be spring that makes him recall her mobile dimpled face when on a dark screen, the image of an face - an onlooker to the scene of action really - flickers briefly, only very briefly like that spring, this movie.

But sometimes, you are fire's radiance after a long night of heaving through winter snows. As you are the sunlit sea rocking over a coral reef and a diver floating in its sibilance. As you are a treadle stitching together the bombed out fragments of an onlooker's skin. As you are the hearth around which conversations happen over tea. At other times, you are also the absence that flares in autumn with its patterned avenues, in which I rove my tongue, over and over, like a fluttering leaf.

But it is when I cling to you, like a barnacle, I know you are the quicksilver of fish that embroiders these nights of dateless longing, Beloved, of whom I am, perhaps, not beloved.