The world is opaque with frosts. The clarity I seek pools in the lakes that never freeze, tucked in the high mountain valleys. The traveler has left for the plains.

The summers were brilliant with their rose blooms. Now ice cackles in the bucket. Light sleeps in most days until late, and then sleepwalks

into the grove of chinars in which we swung in ever widening arcs from those truck tires, the traveler and I, the we that the waves of time didn't sustain.

What is matter is also light, is also time, is also those swinging arcs in which this story was spun. On my wrist his glass bangle becomes a rune, a Stonehenge whose significance will be lost

in time. And in time, it will be summer again. And again the garden will be dug and the roses pruned, and again the thorns of memory will be hidden, for a while, by the blooms of forgetting.

Love is the deep wound out of which flow all the rivers that we drink from, here and there, my traveler and I.

Note: Lines quickly scribbled in response to this song, as Gulzar's lyric loops over and over in my ear as I sit in the sun, and muse on such matters of the heart.