The landscape of what country Gives shape and color to our traveler And his traveling dreams?

Does he wake like Tu Fu To watch frost, white on the ground Next to his bed, and remember

That in the dream he was dreaming, The tree lined road on which he was Strolling, and even the trees in flower

Were from elsewhere? All this of course Discerned as landscape usually is In dreams, as a backwards gaze cast

At the horizon receding from a speeding Train window: there those spires of an ancient Temple, there that trussed bridge across

A river with a woman's name he might Have once loved, there that dark bodied Shirtless peasant bent over the plow and ox

Tilling the loamy clay like his grandfather And grandfather's father, there that sudden Proverb from one of his unspoken languages

Bursting like a tear, like a bone, from his Skin: a washerman's dog belongs to Neither the house nor the ghat of the world.

[1] Writing is also a way of exorcism, These tongs or toothpicks of words Poking and prodding at all that is hidden Out into the clear light of the day.

[2] I hear your voice play like a blacksmith's Hammer striking the hoop of a wagon wheel Not yet fully formed or fitted on its frame of wood, Still red, and hissing as it sinks into my blood.

[3] I finish reading a page and turn to the next, Not wanting to leave it behind, and at the same time Wanting to go into the next inviting room, to lay My cheek against the coolness of a new floor and gaze At the trompe l'oeil you might have painted for a roof, Hanging over blank note paper like Michelangelo.

[4] Jealousy spurts and flares, and colors my throat blue. I become Neeladri, one who swallowed the primordial Poison before drinking amrita. Learning a lover's history Is like that, even though it is irrelevant, even though I Knows I can't ever possess you totally or at all. Yet this body Wishes it was what was between your arms as you danced, Instead, with that perfect stranger, for only once in your life.

[5] I must have met you somewhere before. Your face looks familiar. Weren't you the shadow Who paused on the bank of Neva in Dostoevsky's White Nights, (which I feverishly read, hidden under A blanket, with a flashlight in my mouth, away From the Cheka eyes of my mother for whom All Russians were communists out to radicalize me), Waiting for her lover to arrive?

You must have shut the book and placed It by your red radio (it must have been late) Before I could hail you from over there, That country of monsoon afternoons.

Strolling this summer day In the grove of words I pick up sensations within My body as I would pick up

Acorns, feathers, pinecones, Spider webs, smooth pebbles, And secret them away in My pockets for a lean winter,

A winter that has just passed. (But will perhaps return again, For who knows how these things Come and go?) And what is this

You may ask, that I am hoarding? Look, treasure maps to that garden Of books in which we were, for far
Too long, sitting at separate benches,

And admiring the vistas of lakes With ripples, the whistle of a hunter, Bark of a pack of hounds, the pinks Of a cherry orchard, the boom of cannons,

Letters that were read with great urgency By lovers, their assignations in musty rooms, A candle at the table that burnt all night As snow massed at a picture window.

This is where I have somehow, miraculously, (Sniffing that X - pirate gold buried here - Marked on your body) arrived, to lean my spine Against yours, and to read away these Remaining hours of my life with you.