[1] August afternoon. Hot and humid. The sun had returned after a week on intermittent rain. He is hunched over a pool webbed with iron, watching a school of newly hatched gold fish swim in arcs among lotus roots. He can’t fix his attention one single little fish as their bodies are one deliberate blur – a crowd milling about in a stadium - in the pool, dark as an eye.

Then it happens, slowly. The blue of the sky seeps in, a few cloud float in, the adjacent building arrives in its suit of red brick and black shades drawn down, and finally a human onlooker saunters in – a person uncertain if he is the right room, in the right building – his own face looking back at his own.

[2] In a bookstore café, still an August afternoon, the heat still wet like a dog’s tongue – the smell of coffee, talk and distances. The fluorescent green table top is a sea between two continents of persons sitting at them & the space between the fingers in a clenched fist is how far this afternoon stands from that afternoon with you, in memory’s archives.

Someone - two, actually, enclosed in the same envelope of a body – is trying out baby names – Flora, Flores, Florence – by saying them out in a voice that vibrates in this ear. Someone else is discussing money and politics and both, someone is keying something into a computer, someone is crushing ice in a blender buzzing like a chain saw, and someone is there, here, observing all this – the eyes of God are observing this someone – till someone else looks back.

[3] A face disembarks from the hold of a glassy August afternoon. This face, now labeled – raven hair, skin shining like volcanic rock, and angles of the face sharp as a Sicilian vendetta – is crisply mounted on wax paper, leaving an after scent of chloroform, and stored away.

You will forget this face, the heat will do it. You will remember this face, dust whirling under open dormer windows on a hot August afternoon will resurrect it.

[4] Machado says: What the poet is searching for/ is not the fundamental I/ but the deep you.

You, which ‘you’, are you seeking in this August afternoon?

[5] Light, deep August afternoon’s, falling on the bare arms, neck and shoulders of a girl sitting by the far window, is absorbing more than a reflection from her skin.

Something else is shining, this mystery which lies beneath.

[6] Light is growing weak; the August afternoon is turning in, its day done. When your note came last, I was reading Spanish poetry, and when I came today I was reading Spanish poetry. If I think of you – musical as a Jimenez’s naked woman, ‘Music -/ a naked woman/ running mad through pure light’ – instead of these far separated wordy notes, Time becomes the wheel, is the wheel, instead of the road underneath it.

I shall say this to you, if I remember it, when we meet again in a hot August afternoon.