It looks like you've begun to measure them,
which is great...
Five or six years ago, you were pushed out
into the gridlock of rickshaws,
the violent coughing of rolling coffins,
and sparring of filthy busses

The metro runs at twenty percent capacity,
but your mind was always full-
brimming with the golden droplets
that dribbled down the chins of happy urchins
and fell through the steamy air
to mix with dust and sediment.

The day you stopped buying mangoes,
carefully picking the biggest ones
to give to the street kids,
I ate my dessert, wandering slowly through the rest of my meal.
The cold lassi was about all I could stomach,
as I sat and thought of you,
the tiny wrinkles by your eyes
and your hair like a river of ink.

I thought about the way your fingertips
caressed the spine of your contemporary poetry book
and about the days we would read Neruda
and William Carlos Williams
on the Ghats at Varanasi.
I wondered if you'd think about me
as you ate your cold plums (or rice pudding),
reclining, alone and out of love with me,
watching TV in the B.R. Singh hospital.