[A] Adrienne, remember the garden in which we walked on that winter day of sudden warmth, its bridle path with absent horses and that frozen pond at one end? Remember how I warmed my cold hands over your spine's archipelago of delicate bones, afterwards?

You may not, I suspect, for fire doesn't track all the moth wings it singes. So I write this memory into ash with my coal hands.

[B] Our twined arms a volute against winter's long fingers in that early spring as we kissed again and again in the grass under the weeping willows.

Now across borders, I wake at nights suddenly, and attempt to clutch at rain's continous blanket of sound. I am stone-cold. Aren't you too, Adrienne?

I shall fill the ditch, which is my heart, with the clay of words,

so that my lines will clutch at the ankles of the Beloved walking all over it after the rains,

so that she will sink into the clay right to her wings, and thus moved from air to earth, she will stay put

send down roots, and become a gulmohar growing out of me.

Remember how we rode bicycles down Hijili Road swept by rain? It is that monsoon season again, when green things take wing. So in this delayed (only by a decade) letter I shall account for gain And loss again. Into which column falls your absence, or this thing: Emptiness felt as pain? Rain’s eyelets form and dissolve on the panes. Beyond lay the obscured years, and an anorak-ed postman who is seeking Me – another man without an address – somewhere in these foreign lanes. Did you finally write me that letter which will remind me of us talking All night? Or remind me of how you ached for atom’s laws, and I ached
For the asymptotic transcendence of words as trains snaked underneath
The copulas of fireflies, of stars? Postman waves, vanishes. Breached Years clearly won’t allow you rush in, excited, your head beneath A wet newspaper to tell me what new quarky dimension you have seen. Nor can I make you hear these horrid descants down which I have been.