[1] Making Faces

When I pursed and elongated my oblong mouth To make my pig face at her teasing laughter, she Returned and kissed my snout, as if I was pitiable.

[2] Lineaments of Gratified Desire

A quite room humming with slight sounds: scrape of Turning pages, scratch of pen on paper, satisfied ex- Halations of two people deeply engaged in reading. Words that are bearing them across a river of time In their fragrant holds - two castaways, even as they think

Of themselves as important engaged in thinking significant Thoughts, always in need of love, a shoulder to lean back On, and an ear to listen to whatever annotation the other Might write on the margins of the book, the book of days.

[3] Raw Material for Dice

In an ancient epic the fate of a band Of brothers was sealed to twelve years Of forested exile by a pair of loaded dice Carved from the bones of a cursed king.

Here, separated from the shadow that My heart used to cast on a sun-glazed Beach, and a brother who promised to Follow me across few footfalls behind,

I wonder from what demon-bone Were the dice fashioned for that Game in which I was blessed With these many years of exile?

[4] Visions at a Window

This is what I ask strangers first, By the way of opening lines In letters I write to them, “Tell Me what do you see when you Look out of your window?

A tree? A bird nest in the tree? A tarred roof spiked with antennae? A panorama of a city twinkling? Sky crosshatched with jet contrails? Or if fortunate, blue expanse of sea?”

Oak, beech, and oak again have been My silent sentinels in these long years Of silence, in which the knife of exile Had slit open the bag of language And taught me their foreign names.

If I look backward, in that orphic Instant, I am covered with the shadows Of more trees: all bloody gulmohars.

[5] Confessor

She tells me, after warning me that I many not approve (because she Doesn’t approve herself?), that she Is in love with a man, as I had already Guessed, who happens to be married.

I say nothing, nothing at all till her Expectation for consolation, forces My doubts to surface on language:

“What horsemen ride in the human heart I have so far barely deciphered, as I haven’t Understood passion and its attendant grief. So into the gaping maw of want, of wanting To be loved and to love back, I feed morsels Of simpler and surer pleasures: talk, laughter And if possible, an approximate kindness.”

[6] An Encounter with Snake Kin

One sodden night this past winter as I was walking the black dog On one of his nightly visitations to my dump, I saw a baby snake Coiled in the middle of the semi-dark sidewalk, issuing a challenge In its forked language, eyes beady with rain, unwilling to back down

And slither away into the frost-burnt foliage. I don’t remember now What I, searching in my reptilian memory, said to it in return, my Tongue dripping with this sweet venom I force from inside myself On Sabbaths. Did I curse it for Eve’s (who has gone missing since) Temptation, my banishment from paradise & my descent into shame?