[1] In what registers of the woman,

(whose gaze intersects my straying gaze, across this room)

does my loner face

(deep brown & scruffy like this wind beaten Japanese maple leaf I use as a bookmark)

sign its name,

(more squiggle than cermonial floriush)

if at all?

[2] As Dylan's coarse low voice sandpapers the words, and each of them becomes an antique coin scuffed clean of identity, the kind seen behind museum glass (which is this ebbing and swelling cafe talk),

I am suffling through money in my purse, looking for the acceptable currency to pay off the ogre of dissapearances.

"The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

• The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused -" -- Philip Larkin

Kannamma, the water lilies have all died last night, in the first frost of a young winter.

On the floor your gold earrings shine, dully, in the dim morning light. Outside the fall leaves are buffed into further darkness by the trickling rain.

I am standing by your back alley door with my plumed breath and sack-hood. Pious ladies of the neighborhood curse me, indolently order me to shuffle off to another's lane.

Your lovers (or husband?- hard to tell for they are all the same to me) don’t seem to notice the ghost that hovers over their shoulders as they banter, or feast, or as they plant their flags of conquest.

The day is brightening, and priests are closing up on our Lord of the Seven Hills. I must have sinned for on meeting you, I didn’t shave my head in thanks. When will you wake up? When will you come out?

It has been years since that morning, Kannamma, when you wanted me to stay, and I had to go to her.

"God is the place that always heals over however often we tear it" – Rilke

These are the stigmata of the untarnished steel nails, which splintered their way into the few hours of that far away summer.

If those hours were glass, pouring song and sweat into them took no effort. See they stand now in the yard, bird bath like.

But when I uncover the fresh messages left by autumn I find that water gone, leaving a chalky stain where it stood waiting for years

To be approached, to be drunk from. Now in remembrance (and perhaps regret) I scrape my tongue over its absence,

and taste blood. This is how I tear into myself. This is how I feast on God.