Moths should learn to navigate darkness Since they so quickly find light. ~ Adam Zagajewski

Strangers kiss as softly as moths. ~ Michael Ontaadje

[1] I know there is some connection between These two lines and last night, when we Turned in for bed, and you turned to me as Believers turn to the body of a nailed messiah.

Yet it must have been the unseeing dark Covering us both, in which I sunk towards The depths where blue sunlight vanishes, For I failed to see your sounding hand.

[2] Unlearned in the art of navigating, By instinct, by sympathy, by faith, You must have collided against Night’s walls, unused oil lamps, Tables loaded with moldy feasts, Everything but what you sought. What was it you sought? Refuge In my body of embers? Light?

[3] So this morning, our spines greet Each other like adjacent tenement Houses, in whose shadows we must learn To kiss again, as softly and tentatively As strangers, as moths in the dark.

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god ~ J.L. Borges

[1] One dreams of what is Unattainable. Rain Outside spurns light. And inside, sleep feeds On memory’s slights.

[2] You surface again, my Severe Beatrice, in your Griffin drawn chariot, Eyes fixed heavenward, A lampshade of flame,

To demand that I confess To the sin of putting reason Above faith. I groan as I have done every time You passed by my side,

In the street, in the market, Neck craning in the direction Of your musk, eye eagerly Scanning the unruly mobs For your damasked gait.

[3] I have been eating from Damnation’s plate, and this city is A river full of raving monsters In whose company you appear. Don’t take this as proof that my

Love for God is greater than my Love for art, and that is greater Than my cursed love for you, for These three remain indivisible even As they appear to stand separate.

[4] Beatrice, we will meet again And always in the continuum Of life, which holds the words I write down on paper, which Holds the rain trickling down

The nape of your neck, The tree of salvation, The resurrection of time.

[A] Adrienne^[1], this was the limited landscape in which the proscribed years of my childhood took shape. And in it I am racing again a bicycle of iron through the puddles after August rains.

The years between - where and what I have been - I would like to forget, sandwiched between the twin aromas of dust, and corncobs on charcoal gnawed on under the last amaltas' bloom.

You ask me to tell you what this abused landscape means after these many years? I can only invoke inaccurate memory to answer instead of pointing to emerald rice fields, mango orchards, and scrub land all plowed under.

[B] We sit in the dark having this conversation; my early gift of aromatic candles are still a standing joke here. Shall I speak of the nights when the moon on the rooftop was as real as the mythical gift giver in that infant lullaby?

Listen. A raga - Kedar - on the radio. I never listened to this music as much when I was here. Yet now, how these half-heard notes unpack these stark hillocks, alleys with madcap saints buried at their corners, and lioness eyes of these ocher women when I walk in your cities.

You say I grow strange and distant at times when we are dozing in each others arms. Yet believe me when I say I need your hands on my spine as the buffaloes we saw need those white egrets. And hours with you are long green streaks of parrots flying home.

[1] An imaginary presence to whom many of my imaginary monologues are addressed