"Just as the trees here are all naked and strange, the heart wonders if she is his or some others'?"

• Anand's Hindustani sher, imperfectly recalled

Why was knowledge first plucked (also why by the woman and not the man?) from a tree, and not instead from a rock, or a river, or a star?

When I came here, to a strange country, I couldn't name any of the trees until my heart became a graveyard, and as markers for memory, I began naming the trees.

This is how I learned the flames of my first fall were from a grove of sugar maples. Later, I wrote hungry poems on the gold of beech leaves,

and hid them in books I gave to her, that woman who perched high above any tree. Dogwoods covered me with their kind shade as summer flared

and splattered my interior landscape with betrayal's ash. More years of education followed. I learned under sumacs, cottonwoods, magnolias

as others (gulmohars mainly) kept receding in the rear view mirrors of years' shuttles. I have forgotten what the flowers on her green skirt

were, she who sang to me? And I have forgotten even more of her, she whose eyes were the color of early spring. So as I am learning to love again

under the mossy branches of live oaks, I know there is no telling what fates have planned for me and this avenue of trees. Will I ever wake to rain one night, many years

hence, like a man hungry for the knowledge (again, why did it have to come from a tree?) of a known world, and reach for the body of my beloved as if she were a tree that always stood in the center of my heart?

Note: Image borrowed from here

For Beloved' street, so much longing, and in my dejection's blood, this drowning.

Note: Remembered this sher from a Mir's ghazal as I was eating dinner yesterday

"We're the only things - leaving religion out of it - we're the only things that know spring is coming" - Jack Gilbert in an interview with Sarah Fay, in The Paris Review

At 10, no thought of mortality yet. His face, uncreased and drenched with talcum powder, flash frozen - how bleary eyed that halogen brightness made him, in black and white, and forgotten in an yellowing album, which no one looks at much anymore, in a far away homeland.

At 20, a night of drunken delight in energy. And chafing at the lines that kept him from Dutch paintings lining the walls of museums in foreign cities, nearly all facing, inwards or outwards,the sea. Also, being unacquainted with the stigmata that is being anointed by a woman's wetness.

Now at a itinerant 30, loved moderately (by few, here and there, and vice-versa), he stands in the woven shadow of a red bud tree in the first flush of spring (the color a woman turns if only one knows how to touch her), and prays for a few more miles, in the course of which he can learn how to, fully, accept gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world, and to bring news back from that distance to this mile.

March 7, 2008; on turning thirty in a Southern spring