Another evening, sunlight slowly fading. You keep looking at the horizon to see the universe at play, playing the same old game of color and shadow. It is March and spring. You are exhilarated by that very fact and try to be grateful for it. Earlier during the day you had read a poem, drunk perhaps is the more accurate verb here. It was as an artesian well is to a thirsty sheep in the arid outback. That poem arose in the poet from a glimpse of a clothesline hung with chemises drying and became a meditation on love and women.

You arrive at the corner, as you think of the poem, the corner where a Japanese magnolia is blooming. You bend down a branch and pluck a bud to take home with you. You say to yourself, wishfully, how nice it would be if you could take this home to someone who will receive it joyfully, as if it was, as it is, a star, a meteor, the wing of an angel. But this wish too shall pass, you say to yourself. You remember the refrain of another poem. This one is by Adam Zagajewski.

You sing shout that line - ‘you should praise the mutilated world’ as you stop at the creek and gather twigs of blooming quince. You have been the object of mutilations – most of them self-inflicted, but now let this evening, this executioner of this day, be a time of renewal. Array those bloody memories you hide inside your form as ikebana, as you will arrange this quince when you return on your desk. Look at them and rejoice. Raise your cup to what has gone, what is already available in this splendiferous spring and what will arrive.

These are the words you tell yourself. The struggle however is not during this moments of long quite into which only an occasional roosting birdcall intrudes. It is when you struggle with your own doubtful lust - desire you have realized is misused and overused – and the perpetual hunger of such a state. There are many such moments in the day too. Yesterday you escaped - a much easier thing to do rather than confronting it, rather that becoming still - into music. You listened to music for many hours, till that breach was dammed and the flood subsided.

You come down the hill and see the sky attain the exact tinge of red as that of a pear tree framing it. You have a impulse to walk down to the golf course where the road curves twice up another hill beyond which the sun can be seen exiting, an actor who keeps coming back for repeated encores even though his performance is very rarely greeted by the applause he deserves – another sign of the holy fool. The Sufis call it being ‘mustt’ – intoxicated. Surely that also explains these lives of quite despair – devoid of poetry, devoid of singing, devoid of anything that pulls one beyond oneself, takes one beyond the self absorption this strange world seems to demand and require!

You suddenly grin broadly because you suddenly see in front of what you were thinking of replenishing – a neatly stacked pile of bamboo waiting for the trash man! Since you have discovered the beauty of bamboo as a receptacle for flowers, pens, coins etc, you have made and given many pieces away. You select two richly browned long sections along with a smaller green section. You drag them a mile home full of gladness, whistling and smiling at others you encounter, running and walking the opposite direction. The tune ‘dum mustt qulandar mustt mustt’ - drunk is this pilgrim, fully drunk!

You put on the shoes, don a jacket and head out into the night. The road is empty at this late hour and the only sounds you hear are that of houses sleeping or an occasional dog bark. You orient yourself with the nearly full moon, a white coin in an unusually clear sky. You have been closeted with yourself all day, so you decide to head to the university campus close by, hoping to catch the hum of conversations, an occasionally shout or some diffuse laughter. You are not interested in the content of such overheard talk; just its presence is what you want. This is just as you go to the farmers market to feast on the visual palette as much as to buy food.

On the other side of the road you see a group of students headed in the same general direction. A young woman in this group, for some reason, begins to laugh. It’s a free laugh, the kind one hears between old friends who have very few secrets left to hide from one another. At the fork you turn and take the road that enables you to walk into the moon, eyes fixed on it just as a compass comes to rest at the North Pole. You see it cradled in the branches of oaks, and then climbs on to the top of the chapel’s steeple. You had read Kazantzakis in ‘Zorba The Greek’, describes such a scene, in which the moon is hidden by passing clouds and then uncovered, as a hen laying a big white egg. You play the same game and call this moon over the steeple an inverted exclamation mark. It somehow fits this night, where everything is lit and is a unsurprise.

You pause on the bridge that runs over a ravine to hear the sound of the small stream that runs below. You say to yourself, that is how kissing a woman at this point would sound, just like that gurgle of pleasure. You walk further to the quadrangle. It’s absolutely empty tonight. You veer off the path and cut across the quadrangle, walking sideways. The roofs of the buildings facing you become a stage for the moon. You want to write a poem, but you can’t find the require thread to string all these discrete images. The silence, while welcome, makes you realize that it is now spring break.

You head home. On the way you pull the branch of a star magnolia to smell it’s flowers. The clutch of these trees with their white flowers makes you want to make a metaphor out of them. You say, ‘these are the moon’s teardrops’. A very cloying one! Soon the moon is behind you, riding on your back and shoulder. You bend your neck and send a pinecone skittering down the sidewalk.

So Scott Adams also took note of us. But I sleep a lot more than that!