Ghost hands keep touching Me in this sunlight space by A window where I am at work.

Small hands unfasten my armor Of indifference, and begin to scrape Away the accretions of all these Unloved and unloving years.

Pale hands keep plunging through The spidery drought cracks of skin And unstop the springs of affection Long recessed in these hard bones.

And it is these winged hands of yours Flitting over my face, which move me from Brittle speech into fluid, salty silence.

"What can I tell you about New York that you don't already know?", asks a poet, the exiled lover of a city not as new. Everything has been lived here before. Everything has happened many times before.

I see this now: the meetings and partings, arrivals and departures, laughter, weeping, gnashing of teeth, and throats unfurling chants, invocations, suicide love letters. If New York has to be sung into ghazal, what script is sufficient? What refrain should its couplets employ? What raga?

What tounge leaning against ours will be soft enough to touch the solitude that lives in the gaps between these avenues, and these players playing in the avenues? What maps of grammar will be able to replace the knowing of memory with obliviousness of forgetting, in this new city where everyone appears as if we have met them before?

Night after nights will finally arrive alone. I shall go out to meet it half way down the lane With its other friend, the moon.

We will sit and talk all night, the three of us, Me, the moon, and the night, I think mostly, About her, the girl with the abacus in her heart.

The night will say, “Do you remember her blood Stirred with sadness?”, and the moon will respond, “No I don’t, I was too busy laughing till I hurt

At her jokes”. And I will think of her gliding in That zone between moonlight and nightsound, Where I counted the welts on her wrists with all The concentration (and little love), I could muster.