A foot fell between the evening hour and this migration between two years. A call from elsewhere (perhaps home if only one can go back?), from another year as I am driving, wheels skating on ice, through a Bruegelesque landscape that will perhaps become my own, given time, or given some of that fidelity, which I have failed to pluck from the apple tree under which I was kissed by Adrienne(s?).

Meanwhile, the heart's needle - does it register this cold, these oaks looming out of the earthy luminescence like frozen mastodons, or is it lost to itself, as it wanders like a fakir through these whiteouts, unable to navigate towards                                                               Radhika?

As a solitary bird sings in the night, I find you reclining

like a Hindu god on bed of jasmine, great fires burning in your eyes,

and confess I haven't loved others like this before,

for it is only in these hushed bluish dusks that I have come to know again what it is

to listen to a tremor of life, perhaps my own, sleeping, long sleeping,

under the heaviness of snows

[1] The black tar road snakes like a tongue between the icicled trees. This too is how I rove your moonlit body, disrobed and undulant under a night sky empty of snow.

[2] Ice boxes in the houses, and knives air hanging from the eaves. Love too takes possession like this: first glazing the soul, and then throwing a sharp barbed wire against her invisible figure walking in those large snow fields of the heart.

[3] An ailing sun visits the snow capped earth like an old aunt who always wears mourning black, even when attending weddings. Branches bristle with icy thorns outside a room full of shoes. Someone is walking barefoot across a frozen lake. Someone else is scanning the blue veins of a white page.