The chinar confronts the sunset
with its own dusk.
You can hear the drip of crinkled leaf
Isn't this what they call dry rain,
this slow, twisting dead-moth descent
from the sapless branch?

In the eye of the lake
and the running eye of Jhelum
it holds you, this bonfire death
that slowly drips fire,
these smouldering rusts
without the clank of metal.
A wind alights on the tree
and the eye cannot follow
each bronze-scale severed
from the mail of the dying giant,
each clenched child-fist of a leaf,
the largesse of it
the aching drift of it
the flame and the fall of it.