[1] Into this dark space after I send out pain a single bubble at a time, I measure it's depth again. I have a lot of more opaque water, turgid like soap, to work through, see it's not easy to overturn the bowl, to spill the bleak waters and become an clean space, see it takes time sometimes a few days and sometimes a whole life.

[2] A couple adopted a stray dog,which she took home. I have been adopted too, a stray loner by a love I can't name or measure. It drips through the hourglass's neck, fine sand dribbling through and into my cracks, steadily filling. On it, I am being slowly risen again into the horizon as the foam of waves, which are wiping away traces of names, which are wiping away the castles of pain.

[3] I am standing in the sky leaning and measuring the fall, a single stray thought that says: jump. They say that high places almost make one to let go, the height makes one to take mindless leaps. Her soulful eyes that were about to leave were one such height. Those words were the gusting wind: how I felt about her? She asked them. And I held my breath and took two steps away from any free falling. I was not certain of what my body would hit

Each a movement away, into something new: shedding pain, diving into love and surfacing on her shore.

2002:12:30 01:00 Atlanta (AD)

For C.T, T.F.C, R.J and S.B

Usally a poem is "for"ed for a single person, but since all the four people mentioned were pivotal in it's writing, it's for all four.

Forgetfulness is like a song That, freed from beat and measure, wanders. Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled, Outspread and motionless, -- A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night, Or an old house in a forest, -- or a child. Forgetfulness is white, -- white as a blasted tree, And it may stun the sybil into prophecy, Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

I sit at the table and across the distance, what measure should I invent to measure such distances?, is the chair angled to one side, left as you last sat in it, restoring to me your presence that I can only imagine and not sense, not sense but invoke, like an ancient sound

or an ancient memory: first of summer, because this is winter, of a koel singing at my window in a far away landscape and as my feet turn cold: another, of winter, fog rising from an exhaling earth that window becoming opaque and the koel's song being left to be remembered in wisps of smoke rising from blown candles and blown memories.

And in between these two memories, I am in a room of white curtains, I am standing behind them looking into where you sit, a single tress frames your angular face as it swings and sways a swing suspened from a pepul tree, the river flows, sound of breaking waves, and I am being risen towards a sky of blue, closer and closer but never reaching as the Laws, like gravity, that apply in exact measure, divide me between memories, divide memories between countries and divide countries within me, I am in one country, my memory in another and you have already left for another: across that distance, I can call but can't measure,(what measure should I use and what measure should I invent?)

And just as you place that tress back behind you ear, years will place back these moments of a recalled day's clarity into chambers of memory. I get up and straighten this angled chair which still remembers you, if only by how it is across the distance, across the table where we sat.

2002:12:22 23:30 Atlanta For Su