“Paisley on the Beach,” it cried, at which I woke to see

the camera panning over sand, a flame-

haired girl turning her head at me to wink,

Paisley the name of a Scottish slum,

the ad a dig at its fallen fortunes, the name, too,

become a ’70s joke. Even Shahid

laughed at it, asked if I knew

its origin and laughed again when I recited his poem:

the consort’s tears, her gorgeous and immortal rage.

Now two decades later, cancer of the brain

has taken him: a fact that friends

and college colleagues mourned, arranging

at the end for me to take his vacant place.

Now I’m Shahid’s line at work, years later,

his presence something few have known,

our admiration turned into a nickname that assumes

I’m to assume his position and importance: to grow

our works in one; that I might paper

over the complications of our private desires:

his to join the ranks of Faiz and Merrill, their fame

rushing mouth to mouth like a valley brushed

with fire, the whole of Kashmir become a flame

of light, a twisted tear of circling stars.

Mine to sing again of Parvati who, in my version,

doesn’t run away but watches Shiva

in his sulks rush off, who wrestles him back

into her arms, the strength of her love even

greater than the god’s. In my story, she is the one

who stays steady, holding the key

to her consort’s brilliance that both erases

and highlights her. When I began

to recite his poem, he lobbed the phrases

back, challenged my embroidery

with flourishes of his own until the text

became some strand of sense between us twisted,

line by line unraveled to its parade of shadows,

our faces darkening as the sun began to set—

Write to me, he begged. But in what tale of exile,

love, or industry where the grieving goddess waits

for her lover to forgive then find her, tear-

marks fresh upon her face? And if I write,

will he return again to his mother, sister,

to Kashmir’s lost post office, will Paisley’s

weavers begin another shawl in which

we’re bound, part of its ever-changing piece-

work, placed on the edge and in the center of its frame,

each slip of color throwing the rest into relief?

At first, I thought it strange coincidence

both town and pattern shared a name, but of course

industry overtook belief, gave the heady

Persian story its Glaswegian veil, overlay

upon overlay, reengraved the pattern already

extending its reaches through every border

of the world. What a strange inheritance to order:

each generation taking up then losing

the thread of the next, the pathline of one’s fame

or obscurity traced through others, so that we sink

or rise together anew, the pattern’s

changeability both its beauty and its flaw.

Write to me, he said. He, who for a game

slipped friends’ names into poems,