The world is full of paper. Write to me. ~Agha Shahid Ali

Today evening when I saw a rain tree shaking its golden tassels in the storm-wind, I couldn’t but remember bangles on her hands closing over my eyes from behind.

Once around midnight, in a supermarket, an old man started questioning me in Hindustani. I couldn’t reply for my tongue kept tripping on stones, words of that world were hiding behind.

Last year in the mohallas of a city, a constant interrogative from strangers: have you returned? As I answered, “Yes, only for a few weeks”, I knew exile was a skin one cannot slough behind.

Behind a windscreen blurred by rain, when I saw her intimate, lovely Judas face kissing, I crossed the street yet her finely wrought dagger of betrayal stabbed me from behind.

From memory’s iron manacles, O Sashi, how will you yourself unbind, When that ivory painted trunk filled with all the keys you have left behind?

Heart, let no memory enter tonight. Body, don’t trash with thunder, for with time Everything will recede to a proper distance. Pain will slowly drift into tonight’s rain.

Friend, be still at least in my dreams even as You recede into a landscape veiled with smoke, Blockading all the mud-slick roads behind.

God will be called from minarets in The coming dawn. But I shall stay silent Behind the windows of this unmapped alley. I won’t pray for a cure to this insomnia.

Borrowing words I shall ask, will you permit me Voyage into your angular hands some night?

What is it men in women do require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire. What is it women do in men require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire. ~ William Blake

[1] The very last time (even though We didn’t know this as yet) We were attending to our mutual And always separate hungers (think Of the many separate tongues with Which a daylily laps summer air.)

You demanded that I break The silence of effort, of ex- Halation and inhalation with Words. So I gave you Neruda (Leaning into the afternoons, I Cast my nets into the sea trashed by Your oceanic eyes) I had previously Memorized reading him to you.

I could see, even then, those words Meant more for bodies that coil In the mind, fall heavily to our bodies Stoned with sex, like airplanes with Ripped fuselages. They are still Falling towards mine like starlight.

[2] Next weekend you met, honestly, you Said, with no intention to deceive me, A man who stuck to what he knew Best. None of my abstractions, God Forbid, in bed, none of the mad Fumbling to unbutton the soul from Its sackcloth of fluid and flesh.

He laid it out all straight you said. You breast in his mouth was just That, a round supple mass of flesh With a great capacity for pleasure, As was your sex engorged over his. It was the flow and you went with it, You said. Did I understand any of this?

Yes, I do now. Cross Freud with Rumi: “Sir, sometimes a penis is just a penis, And not a fragment of the light-body!”