In the market today, I met K, your friend From that time when we were, perhaps, More than friends, as I was hunched over Crates of plums, feeling for deformities In their flesh, as you had taught to me to

Years ago. And it has been years since I Have seen anyone, or anything, that may Have whirled around your world, in orbit. She said, “Hello, I guessed it was you, Even though you have changed a bit.”

We, then, exchanged the usual tokens: Pleasantries, interrogations with stock Replies, grins, comments on the price Of plums, and where we reside here, Anonymously, in this large city.

I didn’t ask about you, nor did she Volunteer anything in return, for I Am sure, she was a witness to our Parting of ways, our quick migration To different corners of this country,

Besides past is best kept in abeyance, If not buried. And strangers can’t Talk about old intimacies, which, If looked back at, with a sideways Glance, seem strange and devoid

Of meaning. Memory is not a view That one might look at in one’s dreams, But these seemingly innocuous habits; How to tie shoelaces so that they don’t Come undone when running sprints,

Or how to pick and chose plums, By their color, by feeling their flesh. I could do neither, before I knew you, And now having been taught how to, I can’t seem to forget, even if I want to.

All children have cheeks and all mothers spittle to wipe them tenderly. ~ Saul Bellow in 'Herzog'

Distressed voice of a woman, over on Telephone wires, is telling you how Her joints have swollen up, or how she Now, on many mornings, finds it hard To walk.

You chide her, as gently As you can, to take vitamins, to take All this suffering in her stride, and let Time do its job of healing. Or is it Erasure?

Later while reading a novel, when you Encounter a memory of childhood: A mother wiping her son’s face, tenderly, With a handkerchief wet with her spittle, Lapses of the years past,

Come back again, to the fore. “Why was it so hard for you to Express love, in any other form But as a striving towards effacement Of lack?

And now that I have, what you, In your turn, couldn’t have, I still Suffer. And the vista is seeded with Inabilities; mine to ask for Your love,

And yours to ask of me solicitude And comforting, instead of gruffness Or this aloof distance. Perhaps this was Meant to be so, these painful welters in The chiaroscuro

Of razor edged bonds, which range Between me and the others, between Me and you, Mother.”

As believers await apocalypse, and the second coming is prophesized in avidly read bestsellers, and as wars (perhaps only a sign that human Sin exists, and awaits redemption by a fresh Lamb of God?) have become TV spectacles, almost scrubbed clean of blood, even though uncounted dead pave the streets (we no longer count crosses borne by others) of desert cities, and as at every Easter, movies about an ancient crucifixion grow even more bloodier and awful,

And as rain scurries over spring trees breaking into blossom, as earth exudes its fragrant aromas after many months of dead winter, I lay in your enfolding arms all afternoon, writing love poems on your body, and keep traveling towards Paradise.

Notes: The title could also, perhaps, be: Why god is merely this era’s collateral damage? Or why redemption is possible only through human love? Or why I keep writing poems?