When walking through a bookstore, my eyes hover just for a split second over a red bookjacket:

Catch-22

another way to recall your life, my life such as they were then, and are now.

Where there were words, discovery flows, all shocked out of the pith -

• Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

It is now half a decade since then

when I stood with her on that Ohio river

dock on a chill fall evening, light

only at its horizon, stitched to it by jet contrails,

pointing to two shore birds veering away

into the wind blowing off the water,

I said, "See" She said, "What?"

It is only now I allow myself to admit

that it was only then when I could dare to give

a name to you, Kannamma.

In that far away rasp

with the echoes of firesticks shared under a tropical sun

you ask for a hum-song to sleep against

the way new born puppies with their curled tails sleep against the nippled belly of the bitch, life giver, fate condemnor

I merely blow air against the earring, jingle jangling, from your right ear