You came and left, and in between there is no evidence of yesterday.

On the desk a stray hair, longer than any hair of mine, on the bed the smell of your sweat.

Still I forgot so many details in just twelve hours and in twelve more I may even
forget about everything of your arrival and deprature.

Winter deepens and nights shorten very convinently, so that too much light may not impugn the dark or too much warmth may not thaw my freezing.

Darling, when your fingers touched me every prison of ice holding each cell of mine thawed and cried hot tears, remember their taste?

Darling, there are no signs left in this wintry landscape, where everything has been snowed in and everything left behind our old road atlas is only good for burning as roads have vanished.

Darling, when I see other eyes tonight, I would see those eyes alone, it no longer, is as those days, when I saw your sad eyes in all other eyes.

Now you have to come and not leave so that of everything in between, I may forget, so that of everything in between, I might see,

I still, may remember your warmth, imprisoned in sad ice and still keep your sad eyes, as some evidence of yesterday.

2002:12:16 15:30 Atlanta

On remembering lines of Agha Shahid Ali's ghazal:

He's freed some fire from ice, in pity for Heaven; he's left open-for God-the doors of Hell tonight.

Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar --Laurence Hope

Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight before you agonize him in farewell tonight?

Pale hands that once loved me beside the Shalimar: Whom else from rapture's road will you expel tonight?

Those "Fabrics of Cashmere-" "to make Me beautiful-" "Trinket"-to gem-"Me to adorn-How-tell"-tonight?

I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates- A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.

Executioners near the woman at the window. Damn you, Elijah, I'll bless Jezebel tonight.

Lord, cried out the idols, Don't let us be broken; Only we can convert the infidel tonight.

Has God's vintage loneliness turned to vinegar? He's poured rust into the Sacred Well tonight.

In the heart's veined temple all statues have been smashed. No priest in saffron's left to toll its knell tonight.

He's freed some fire from ice, in pity for Heaven; he's left open-for God-the doors of Hell tonight.

And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee- God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.

A single violin and a sequence of notes. Another winter night in another winter. How to Name It, an album that I have been lugging with me since I was a kid, 1986 I think. An appropriate tape to play as I try to fashion the image of my soul on blank sheets of paper, the music rising and falling, as old and as familiar as the cold outside. Before I say it shouldn't be this way, I realise things are how they should be, each note perfect as in this sad fugue, two violins talking to one another, one questioning and one answering, without a pause. Within me too there are two violins, only the violinists are out, perhaps talking a walk in the sky. Today when I saw the downtown spires hidden by the mist, I thought how would it be if one can just step off from a builiding, say fifteth floor and take a walk in those mists. I suspect my violinists are walking in those mists now, very silently.

Winters have to be, by decree, silent. The only sound that is permitted is the sound of pen ruslting over paper or the sound of the type writer keys making their music. I will also permit myself music, nothing frivilous, no dance music but music in which each note is distinct like cuts on my chapped lips, and as sharp. Years roll on by, today someone said I am too mature for my age. I should have told her that it's winter, which paints everything in somber tones, teal or the color of dusky wine. And in these somber landscapes,I imagine a snow covered field and over that memories fliting like birilliant butterflies. Maybe if I should have peeled open my irises like an egg and showed her these memories, sartling images,maybe she would have understood. No perhaps, just startling for me, for in the commnality of human experience startling is shared too and that makes it a common memory. Take this one for example: the feel of lips meeting cold lips.

This is my third winter, I won't be breaking into a song like Nat King Cole: "I dream of a White Christmas". I remember my first snow fall in the first winter in the first world. I woke up to a sublight dawn and snow flakes were falling. There was so much beauty and I stood at that window watching a swing suspended from an oak tree, fill silently with snow. I was too enstranged from the woman in my life then, too much filled with disquiet to write a poem or a haiku like Basho. Listen to what he says:

"The first soft snow! Enough to bend the leaves Of the jonquil low."

I was bent low with a fear of being left alone, scampering like a field mouse on that field of snow, lost. I had pushed myself too hard and her too. She left me, the last conversation ending with that last click of a phone crashing and then static on the line. She had enough of my madness and my fumbling passions, swinging from music to poetry to hiking to sailing alone in the Pacific, in my version of Kon Tiki. We never spoke after that.

On this silent winter night as thoughts go out to that morning and to her, I wonder what lessons did that winter teach? To learn how to bend and accept the measure of sorrow and extinguished dreams? And my pen grows silent lost in these questions. The violins now begin to sing "You Can't Be Free". But they too must die as do these memories of the first snow.

"Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die."

So wrote Basho about cicadas and me.