Rain clouds must have cleared in the night.
The day stands like a young god between
The oaks, cloaked in a sheet of fine mist
Demanding a hymn

           And I seek that old Rig Veda

Verse I used to sing with hundred other voices
In a distant school yard, sonorous Sanskrit raising:
“May we banish the dark shadows of ignorance
(and pain, its attendant twin) by lighting the wicks
Of our souls as we urge them into knowledge.”
                           Then I must have been

An indifferent student if not an insincere seeker
For I open journals again this morning to dribble
And splatter the pages with waxy words. Something
Is burning within me, only that I still don’t know
Who I am or what it is.

Dear X,

In spite of wanting to call you, I won’t. We don’t hear or understand each other Over the buzz of time’s snub nosed hacksaw Grinding, grinding away at our bones,

Or at least now, we don’t want to. Even though it was your hand that cast This die, was I there at your elbow – specular, Only different voiced – urging you on?

You have now become an idea, a symbol, A chunk of my past trussed up in memory’s Linen – a mummy in a display case by the door That I point to the visitors, usually accidental

Drifters into my ever-shifting alley. I am
The grim curator narrating his quick spiel, Confident of his approximate reconstruction Of a cloudy past. You don’t interrupt. You don’t

Say that there is a fib, this here is hagiography. You stay there behind your glass of silence. Besides my days are nights in your time zone. So in spite of wanting to call you, I don’t.

Sincerely, Y

PS: Just return early tonight from your working day, I will be sitting up in my sleep for our talk On the dead and the undead.

Watching a rainy morning mirrored In the wash of the lake, trundling on A path littered with driftwood, I find I am cajoling my gypsy soul with this Half understood and half felt Transcendental nonsense chant:

"All journeys come to rest and all rests Merge into eternity. That mad laughter, That flash of an mascara-ed eyelash, That green glittering forest skirt And those weak hungers of your body For all that is hidden underneath Will change with time. Only the wind Strumming the water shall remain. So loaf, rest and learn to listen To this music."