Kashmir came alive this evening. It was just a voice, yours. But as it cleaved the cool moonlight night, boat hulls were cleaving the waters of Dal Lake, O Friend.

I stilled my voice but that was not attention enough. I should have silenced my heart till you were done and heard the murmurs of blood rushing over all of Kashmir's roads, O Friend.

Who will console me when your sorrow reaches my shores? Will my voice be heard over gunfire? Give me your eyes so that I may see what you saw and then open your hands to receive my tears, O Friend.

Two young boys surface and float in my dreams, six women stand in a circle blood streaming from between their legs, dogs clawed their clothes to shreds, an old man stands mute, with a photograph of his son, so tell me how do I begin to map death here, O Friend?

The moon moves in clean arc with so much certainity, will it be able to tell as much to that young solider with a false swagger if he will live to see another morning, O Friend?

Who will answer and who will call? Green waves break and eyes wait anxiously at doors, at windows, wondering who will come back and who will be lost for ever to the darkness of this night? Lend your voice and answer them, O Friend.

Please don't become silent!

For J, who gave me the voices for this poem about 2 weeks ago.

I sit beneath the maple trees, whose leaves color the rain and fall with infinite slowness. Meanwhile memories are bursting open like jars of fragnant pickles.

First:

there I was and next to me there she was. Which She? Who was this? And where was I? Which song played on the radio? It must have been a radio hit, a popular love song, "I will love you, truely madly deelpy", that almost believes it's own prosaic verses. As much as I almost wanted to believe that moment would last forever when I was almost in love with love as I was with that temporal beloved.

Second:

there I was sitting under a tree. Which tree? What tree? Whose tree? Was it the tree of knowing that lies beyond all this unknowing, Buddha's Bodhi tree? Or was it the tree from which Eve was plucking her apple? What poems did I recite? Was it Rilke's Autumn or Neruda's Ode to Wine as I ate that fruit. What fruit was that? An apple, a pear or that deep redness that she hid between her legs?

Third:

there I was leaning against the window watching water trickle down. What water? Was this the rain? Or simply deep grief? What did I say to myself? What did others say to me? And did it ever stop raining as I sat there, with my veins slashed, in my blood drenched shirt and feasted upon myself, pickled with memories of sitting, walking and kissing under trees.

I close the jars, get up and walk away. Leaves continue to fall in the rain, under the trees.

Sis, you said "The bastard butchered it, I look like a boy." Haircuts are expensive here or so I note. The cost of a haircut can feed a family elsewhere on this planet for atleast a week.

I have butchered my hair many times. She liked it, that straggler look, that one as if I had just been freed from Auschwitz and had walked right into her arms on that station platform in a Mid West city, belive me when I say if I could have held her any closer I would have.

A friend said I look like an elephant with my big floppy ears when I cut my hair too short. You say you are a guy and it doesn't matter too much. Anyway I am losing hair or is it the other way around, hair, time and loves losing me? My forehead grows gaunt and I snip a stray hair that stands alone where there were many before standing around it.

Memories alas, don't accede to the same treatment. I have so many memories to lose, to drop this load that I carry on my back as if I am always playing the game of sack racing. I used to carry my sisters around on my back. Indentations remain of all of them and others, kids big and small, whom I gave my love. Maybe I can give you a ride too, around the block sometime.

What else can I say? That these hairs on my head are like roots, that I uprooted from a country from a memory, that I am a tree hanging upside down aching for a sweet ache I couldn't love and one that I can't ever escape from, as I carry it in the tone of my skin and the hollow space of my voice box?

Why talk of all this now? Your hair will grow back soon and soon everything will be erased,

including butchered haircuts.