'The poet left last week.
He's in Lahore,' she says.
Indeed, his cleared desk
declares an absence:
glossy teak provides
no traction for the Persian couplet.

Windows open to a lawn
where hoopoes run,
abruptly stop
and probe with secretarial insistence.
Crows remain unseen,
calamitous in tulip trees.

'Lahore?' I say,
remembering that night —
the rout of rhyme
in scented alleys of the Hira Mandi:
broken framework for
rehearsed embrace.

The shrubbery is circumspect:
reluctantly reveals
a rusting Riley Nine —
chancroidal wreck adrift in undergrowth
and dusted with
the petals of magnolias.

Allahabad, 1930