"There are courtships that are perfumed in absence" - Michael Ondaatje, "In The Skin of A Lion"

Approaching a new lover is like entering a new and distant city, at dusk, on a train. The four bar tracks, one going towards and one going away from the city, split at the outskirts, where the lover's skin begins. They, like the music of various dialogs that compose the noise of the city, are various, and have the quality of improvised music.

Some of these tracks vanish into, and end in, siding yards which blanketed with weeds, stones, trash. Some end up becoming the floors of slum tenements. Some become secret paths, shortcuts to someone's backyard. Many of these are perhaps routes to parts of the city that is invisible under that more voluble and colorful city that the traveler hears, and sees in the falling dark. Also on some of these tracks that seem to go nowhere, one can discern shapes of rusting carriages, sometimes just a large set of iron wheels. These are, perhaps, memories of past lovers, to which one rarely goes back, in order to stand in the skeleton of a past time.

This also happens, sometimes, the signals of talk, in all their faultiness, switch his approaching train to a really insignificant track, a detour. Then time reverses itself, and collides with the past. The screech of the brakes, iron on iron, is the traveler's silence in the evening mist. The confessed fact: "I held him, a ghostly stranger whose anonymous warmth I borrowed for that night, in my mouth", while insignificant, is a sudden shower of sparks, against which his weary eye shudders.The train has to then wheel backwards as the traveler sews up pages of these revealed maps tight.

He will say later, if asked, "This is where griffins live. And my heart now carries too strong a flame to go there, for otherwise jealousy will burn down its osmotic membrane. And now all I desire is to pull into the Central Station before night completely engulfs this city, standing on the footboard, covered with coal soot, waving my arm, and shouting her name as I search for the skies of her eyes among the platform's throng."

Written on the Path Train, somewhere between Newark Penn Station and the World Trade Center Station