Pablo Neruda wrote many odes to many elemental things such as an onion, a dictionary, a telescope, a suit etc. But he forgot to write one for the glance, an ode for which I need to read tonight. So I sit here at my table, pen poised over paper, priming the gears of the mind, the engines of the heart, hunting to say something simple about the glance, only to return to a dream that woke me up this morning, that dream of passing by a glance at a café, doubling back, back stepping to check if this was the glance, the glance that I seem to be on a chase for some time now, a glance hanging from the tip of an eye getting into a railway compartment, a glance caught sideways across a room in which someone is teasing a raga from his throat, a glance encountered when one eye flutters open for a second during lovemaking and the other eye receives it like the mouth of a postbox, a glance at dusk reflected in a shop’s display window, a glance crossing the road at a zebra crossing or zipping by in a car in the opposite direction, a glance that will blanket the open eye like sleep or forgetting, that glance whose glance I am chasing with this meager net of words like a butterfly in an endless field of insomnias.