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Picture the arbour first. The night has drawn close around the kunja, and the vines have woven themselves into a green wall, a living curtain the grove itself has hung to hide what is too sweet for the world to see. Inside that wall the rasika Couple have just finished examining the maidservant's singing, and now They are absorbed in Their own play, an intimate amorous battle in which neither truly wishes to win and both keep losing on purpose. Outside, pressed to the leaves, a maidservant has found the small holes the vines could not close, and through these little windows she drinks with her eyes the mind-stealing sweetness she has no other way to hold. She does not enter. She only looks. This whole verse is spoken from that posture: a heart at the gap in the leaves, unworthy by its own confession, and yet unable to look away.

For the one who keeps this meditation knows exactly what he is doing. In his outer mind Śrīpāda protests that he is totally unqualified to behold such a face, that nothing in him has earned the sight of it. And still he wants it. Still the longing rises faster than the protest. This is not contradiction; this is love, which always reaches past its own deserving and trusts the mercy of the Beloved to bridge the distance. So we begin where he begins, "bhāvaye": I meditate, I think upon, I hold this face before me. O Rādhe, let me hold it too.

Begin with the locks. "Calat-kuṭila-kuntalam": the restless, crooked curls that fall along the sides of that face, never quite still, stirred by the play and by the very breath of it. The tradition gives us the picture and we let it bloom: that bent-down, softly shining moon-like face is a golden lotus, and these dark downhanging curls are thirsty bumblebees crowding the flower, drunk already on its fragrance, mad to drink the nectar at its heart. See how they hover. See how they refuse to leave. Even Her own hair behaves like a lover before that face, and who could blame it.

Then the forehead. "Tilaka-śobhi bhāla-sthalam": across that wide calm space the tilaka is drawn, a single sweet mark of consecration, the sign that this beauty is not loose and worldly but vowed, set apart, holy in its very sweetness. The lamp upon the lintel of the temple is small, yet it tells you a deity dwells within. So this small mark tells the heart: here is the dwelling place of the rasa itself, the inner sanctum of all sweetness, and you are at its door.

Then the nose, and from its tip the pearl. "Tila-prasava-nāsikā-puṭa-virāji-muktā-phalam": a pearl that shines at the very end of Her nose, light as a tila blossom, the sesame flower. It hangs and catches the dim grove-light and lets it go again, swinging the smallest swing when She moves. How can one pearl undo a heart? And yet it does. The whole longing of the watcher gathers on that single bright trembling point, as if all his love had found one place small enough to rest.

And now the whole circle of the face together. "Kalaṅka-rahitāmṛta-cchabi samujjvalam": a glistening moon, the luster of nectar itself, but a moon with the stain washed out of it, the spotless moon the sky has never once managed to make. The moon of the night sky carries its dark mark and its waxing and waning; this face carries no stain and never wanes. Its light is not borrowed and cold like the moon's. It is warm, it is living, it is lit from within. And what lights it is rati, the deep amorous love, the fullness of feeling that brims up in Her and pours out through every feature. That is why the verse calls the face "peśalam": tender, soft, exquisitely melting, "ati-rati-peśalam," abundant with amorous love. It is soft because it is full. Love has made it gentle.

And there is more here, for those whom the tradition lets come near. In this play it is Śrīmatī who takes the leading role, the active part that is usually His, and it is precisely in this condition that Śrīpāda most longs to see that radiant face. For Svāminī becomes victorious in Cupid's battle, and when She perceives that She is giving Her Beloved an ecstasy He could not have conceived, then Her face turns into an ocean. An ocean of delight, wave upon wave of it, and the fish-like eyes of the maidservant go swimming out upon those waves, lost and glad to be lost, witnessing what cannot be told. This is the moment held inside the words: not Her beauty alone, but Her joy at making Him joyful, the bliss that flowers on a face that has just made the Beloved blissful. That is the face the seer meditates on. Not a portrait. A living radiance in the very act of loving.

O Rādhe, let this be my meditation too. Not to seize the sight, but to stand where the maidservant stands, at the leaf-gap, and to be allowed, by Your mercy alone, to gaze: the curls, the tilaka, the trembling pearl, the nectar-moon with no stain in it, the whole tender circle lit from inside by love. And the saints are plain that such play is truly relished only among those who have themselves tasted it. Śrīla Rūpa Gosvāmī sings it, "rasikā saṅga raṅginām": it is joyfully experienced in the company of rasika saints. And Śrī Jīva Gosvāmī fixes it in the Prīti Sandarbha, "tad anubhava-mayaṁ rasa-sāraṁ svānubhava-mayena rasenaikatayā vibhāvya pibataḥ": that the very essence of rasa is tasted and drunk together with experienced rasika devotees, what one heart cannot hold held among many. So I do not ask to possess. I ask to belong, at the edge of the grove, to those who love this face.