In the middle of Houston (or any other American city), you are listening to the surf of traffic breaking over a plangent Bhairavi.

It is morning after a night of rain; first green of spring grass blankets the curbs. It has been nearly a decade since you have drowned here, in this bathtub of ideas, which you once thought stood for America; but what is America?

And what kind of an Orpheus should you become to sing here, in America, for a Beatrice who now remains as an idea than a flesh and blood reality? To feel the hasty passion of those younger years then, when knowing less, the mind did not constrain the imagination from embellishing imperfections.

Will it liberate though, the anemic heart from all its conditionals?

Traffic roars and pours.

Blue necklace left/ On a charred chair/ Tells that Beauty/ Was startled there. - Alun Lewis

In post, a box of books arrive.

Is this what happens when the weather in the inconstant heart shifts? Like weeds that must be purged, does one take down the books given by a lover (about whom the heart is certain no longer - was he the beloved or a passing hope?), and send them back with no note?

Handwriting in blurred blue on the label is all she has left to remember of his hands by - those which quickened her charred beauty once.

Some mornings, not all,

as fog hovers over the ice floed river,

a vee of ducks suddenly rounds

that far bend, swings upriver,

and then as suddenly vanishes like a filament of blue smoke.

Love, memories of you veer in like so much like this: so suddenly, and so gaspingly sharp.

Feb 6th 2008, Arkansas River