you are a tea bag, my love
From Vol. 1 No. 5, 1999

If there are certain calender days by which one might reasonably mark time “this time” please tell them to me now. Days, these days, have been scarcely differentiated from one another, like instant tea granules dissolved in water. Or again, like antiquated buttons tossed willy-nilly in a box. Please pick one now, and I will slip my pen into the buttonhole, start from there, draw constellations like a spyrograph. These atomic patterns need not make sense tomorrow. Only now, in order that I may position myself in this chair suspended in the air by piano-cables.

Someone, trying to be helpful, has penned the phrase shards of memory. Thus we know that memory is sharp, and partial, fractured and favoured according to accident or inclination. A sharp stone held in the mouth. Or a series of them, alternating, following the caprices of the moon. Moon-stone: the colour of the sheen on a fish-tank, which is colourless, only holding its moon-stone sheen if glanced at obliquely — there – suddenly becoming luminous by some trick of the light. I remember you this way.
I remember you as a luminous saxophone player at sunset, standing on a temple-rooftop, heralding something. I can’t remember what it was. I remember that your naked chest was bronze because it suited my to think so. It suited you, the muscles of you, the bronze light in which you were cast. But now, perhaps it suits me to imagine you were wasting your breath, animating that brass instrument, or perhaps there was no instrument, only breath.
Still, I persist in seeing you as a saxophone player. I even recall gilded blowfish floating from the mouth of the horn and sailing over flat stone roof-tops, eventually disappearing behind the curve of a hill. There was only one hill on the horizon, of course, there will only ever be one hill gathering all music to itself: the destination of all my partial odysseys, the net in which I wind up being caught. Like that accidental hawk imprisoned in the Varanassi train station, swooping in gyres for hours and hours, to finally alight in the rafters, where else, as though it had reached its point of destination, instead of merely its point of exhaustion. No wonder, what with all of us below pointing and calling out, tracing its spiraling course with indicative fingers. There – no, there – no, where?
There were: greasy pakora in a paper dish in the departure lounge, where no one was lounging, they only looked that way from a distance. You drew me a map of your country on a napkin, a series of virtual islands, with a perforated line attaching your home to the rest of the mainland, as in cut here.
Or tear here like the flap on a packet of tea. A thousand tiny perforations in a sac, discrete, now effusing to become the tastefully-dilute essence of itself.