[A] Adrienne, remember the garden in which we walked on that winter day of sudden warmth, its bridle path with absent horses and that frozen pond at one end? Remember how I warmed my cold hands over your spine's archipelago of delicate bones, afterwards?

You may not, I suspect, for fire doesn't track all the moth wings it singes. So I write this memory into ash with my coal hands.

[B] Our twined arms a volute against winter's long fingers in that early spring as we kissed again and again in the grass under the weeping willows.

Now across borders, I wake at nights suddenly, and attempt to clutch at rain's continous blanket of sound. I am stone-cold. Aren't you too, Adrienne?

I shall fill the ditch, which is my heart, with the clay of words,

so that my lines will clutch at the ankles of the Beloved walking all over it after the rains,

so that she will sink into the clay right to her wings, and thus moved from air to earth, she will stay put

send down roots, and become a gulmohar growing out of me.

"Yeh na thi hamari qismat ke visaal-e-yaar hota Agar aur jitey rahatey yahi intazaar hota"

It wasn't fated to be, a meeting with the beloved. Had we lived, only more of this waiting.