A foot fell between the evening hour and this migration between two years. A call from elsewhere (perhaps home if only one can go back?), from another year as I am driving, wheels skating on ice, through a Bruegelesque landscape that will perhaps become my own, given time, or given some of that fidelity, which I have failed to pluck from the apple tree under which I was kissed by Adrienne(s?).

Meanwhile, the heart's needle - does it register this cold, these oaks looming out of the earthy luminescence like frozen mastodons, or is it lost to itself, as it wanders like a fakir through these whiteouts, unable to navigate towards                                                               Radhika?

Ustad Wassifuddin Dagar sings, in the stately Dhrupad style, one of the most lovely night time ragas, Darbari Kanada

As a solitary bird sings in the night, I find you reclining

like a Hindu god on bed of jasmine, great fires burning in your eyes,

and confess I haven't loved others like this before,

for it is only in these hushed bluish dusks that I have come to know again what it is

to listen to a tremor of life, perhaps my own, sleeping, long sleeping,

under the heaviness of snows