Love has left behind ashes and twisted girders. Where there was glass are now moth wings. And a cityscape altered even in dreams

• where are those twin towers you scaled on nights of passion?

You huddle among the tents crowded with wounded feelings, poor miserable refugees turning to anger and sporadic riots. And plot desperately to patch the shell around your conditional

heart again, to stop rain, snot, and bad blood from flowing in, and to project to the nightly news another mission accomplished, and return on success. You wanted to be a poet once, and to live with the wind

coursing through the grass but then another shiny city beckoned you with its labyrinth of endless desire. But sudden fires torched everything clean. Another chance to learn from Issa: "Last night my hut burnt down. Tonight I have a clearer view of the moon."

Notes: As I was walking back to my garret from a late evening run, I turned back to look at the cityscape of Lower Manhattan caught in the golden light of gloaming, and noticed my eye matching the ridge of buildings before it against its memories of older photographs of this city, as captured in early 1990s tourist brochures that my mother brought back with her to India of my childhood, after an "official" visit to these western longitudes.

Obviously, there were two big gaps in that memorized skyline, and there was this ache, given the dispersal of twisted girders from that disaster site - there is one even in the middle of my running circuit, monumentalized in grantine - in this area. And for reasons unknown, phrases from the political PR machine - "return on success" being the latest one - kept reminding me of those more private griefs, which seem to endlessly arise due to the limitations, the conditions we place on that little hut labeled the heart. And that wonderful haiku of Issa's pointing to a unexpected view of the moon.

"For through our lively traffic all the day, In my own person I am forced to know How much must be forgotten out of love, How much must be forgiven, even love." - W.H. Auden^[1]

Adrienne, I am growing tomatoes, the last of them, before winter ellipses all warmth from the days. And in their shade, along with the earthworm, a burrowing silence drills and drills.

I know this enthusiasm for earth, and its vegetal matter we - a framer's grandson and a musician's daughter - don't share. But love for me is an extension of this hard labor, the weight of which I carry for joy, a sowing, and its delayed reaping, if weathers permit.

I bend over the green stems with their fumy smells as I grow colder at the edges, a haunting like the blackness of an icon's eye. What music did I expect to give you, one who can play Bach blindfolded; arias in airy cathedrals when all I know how to do is chop wood?

But if I manage to keep my sanity and these tomatoes from pestilence, when this season is done and bones of this world are embraced by ice, come by for some stew and silence. And in the shadows of fires we can try to remember those memories we will have forgotten out of love.

for N

[1] from Auden's "Canzone"