Stanza, in Italian, means room, And volta - the turn

Of pleasure that comes from Watching Radhika as she puts on

shoes like anklets, and looks up to find him watching her dark eyes,

shaded green and sienna under the bird-lit stanza of cotton trees.

The heart's well with its deeps, which no sunlight seem to reach,

now shuttled between a continent's cities, swaddled in bag and bone,

does it reflect, i.e., feel anything, when the snows of crab apples and magnolias

fall this late hour of an early spring day, other than its old thirst for the ocean?

I try to tell them what that globular fruit tastes like,

tell them how Banjaras scoured it from the thorny and mostly barren hillocks,

and brought it to our childhood streets in their endless autumnal caravans,

tell them how we peeled its turtle shell back, carefully, to sink a hungering finger

into its white custard, and of how we savored whole mouthfuls of pitted sweetness,

and spit to the ground endless constellations of eye-like seeds. Frankly though, sometimes

I don't know if I am talking about that fruit or your memory, Kannamma.