She gazes out of less than a fistful of color, Amused at the irony of being viewed And letting herself viewed through A piece of clear glass stuck on a box of trapped light, Amused at this trace of a trace she would leave On a day’s door, this print of a hand, which usually She dips into water, but which somehow got daubed With paint.

He in passing, a tourist, would look at this Nailed to a wall, and unable to read the language, The script foreign, would based on the barometer Of his own weather, thus report this sighting:

“I saw a woman. She must be a dear saint. I saw a woman. She surely ate the souls of men.”

Huge clouds brew in the interior.

A cauldron of currents with their intersecting vectors Stirs the beast out of its sleep – it has slept for years Now, and had spared me its clutch of claw and jaw, The rip of cloth, the howling at moon as it is poured, Molten silver, into the first quarter of summer sky.

Green beeches rustle with prophecies.

I approach myself, a stranger walking in from the rain, Wild eye fixed on some sign giving fire, spirit doctor With a leather pouch of bead, bone and hallucinogen, Pointing to a stair leading into the sky. Should I climb? Should I approach Xi, the navel, marked inside you?

Sargasso presses its bones to sea surf.

Light pours in from the windows. Green-eyed gimlet, How much of it do you decant? How much is hauled, And hoarded in your amber cellars of clavicle, jawbone, The upturned wrist? In my solitude, absent mindedly, I Open doors. I step into the sky. I become doomed Icarus.

Waxwings knock against your window screen.

What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain? But he who has bought grief’s lottery, bought even the rain. ~ Agha Shahid Ali

Syllables lost. Countries crossed. A drought of no, no and not. My hands sift through the filigreed hours for your word knot.

Stillness and silence after the storm. On the curtains a draught Of shadows. Each breath a bucket seeking water from your ghat.

What was it that slipped so quickly through my fingers, I forgot. Was it time? Was it the heart, partitioned by a cast of fate’s lot?

Cancer dust. Shellfire. Minefield. Barbed wire. Hail of lead-shot. From my interior lands on fire arrive messages, in dash and dot.

I can’t read; blinded by morning’s mirrors that last night’s rain has wrought. Nor can I write, for your sun has eclipsed even my landscape of thought