I walk out of the crowd, Holding my holds close to the chest Like shut doors, a bud Which will not open, shrunk leaves Of a touch me not plant.

Lines of the unspoken conversation Dribble from my pursed lips. So much useless spittle, I think As I spit. A line goes arcing into the cold, Freezing and breaking as it falls to the road.

We didn’t talk. But then what was there To tell or hear? Let everything be A revelation such as this heat of your presence I hold in my clenched fists.

A river, suffering because/ Reflections of clouds and trees/ Are not clouds and trees.

• Milosz

Sun, after three days of dripping Rain, came out young, concealing Its immense age, throwing off glints of forsythia.

You too came at the predestined Hour, a curved jonquil, gazing at the world With two feline eyes of heat.

I was already waiting in the throbbing Light, a book, open and aging On my lap, trying to forget and remember,

That age when I first understood That some truths are lies and vice versa, Or that age when I didn’t know any words.

Beauty, time, leaping shadows, letters, Steamboats, news and feelings arrived with you. And then departed, their horns echoing into the evening.

But now I am here A tree on the bank, suffering because The water in which I see myself at this barely lit hour Is not the water before you came.

Morning sun is breaking shadows from the trees. Birds too break off. They are trying to feed. I can’t compare them to leaves for this is winter still and trees contain only themselves and their shadows. My neck is craned skywards, as I try to place this looking glass suspended around my neck, on flitting bird to flitting bird. I am aware of the breeze on the nape of my neck. It is slightly cold but is getting warm.

For a while I am free of the assault of memory’s horde. I am intent only on seeing. I don’t try to catalogue what I see. How does it matter if I can identify this bird framed in the eyepiece or not? That can come a little while later along with associations, that sometime idiotic human obsession, where a certain bird is allowed to stand for a certain idea or even worse a person. The scarlet cardinal is scarcely changed if I call it a flying stab wound or the daemon of a woman whose beauty had moved me deeply.

I am also aware of the human capacity to construct elaborate philosophies, first by conjuring words – some of the more egregious creations being god, devil, and sin - to explain any and all of action or inaction. I will myself not to do any of this. I shall just be a witness.

-- After Pablo's Presence and Absence

A house on sea, a house of words Foggy foam flecked words, a ship Beached, a bottled ship whose masts Bend with these chants of his poems These bird like creativities in the mad Uncertain world, soaring skywards, Branches of trees to capture shooting stars, Women whose tresses trail like comets enter And leave. Cats rub their noses against the doors, I am there with him even as I am Here with me. I read. Silence falls over me.

--

I went back to where I first put down pen on paper. I was then fashioning battering rams disguised as poems to storm the singular fortress called the heart, that simple mass of flesh, which on occasions is hard and huge as the largest possible diamond - this astronomers recently discovered in deep space - the residue of a spent star and it weighs more than a trillion tons.

I also found this package of poems, some fifty in number and nearly all of them crude – causal beauty like talk is cheap. They had been written with all the ardor of naïve youth and that is all they retain. He who wrote them is gone, along with her, for whom he wrote them, who if he had paused to notice was himself. All that was left to do was to add one more bead on the abacus of human folly and regret.