Now, moving in, cartons on the flo… the radio playing to bare walls, picture hooks left stranded in the unsoiled squares where pain… and something reminding us

Because he dreams of seeding the w… his eyes bite She looks He looks away He is snow-blind from staring at her breasts

The man giving birth in the dark has died & come back to life again, is stretching out his arms

I am not interested in my body– the part that stinks & rots & brings forth life,

You sleep in the darkness, you with the back I love & the gift of sleeping through my noisy nights of poetry. I have taken other men into my tho…

You gave me a rose last time we met. I told myself if it bloomed our love would bloom,

For a long time unhappy with my man, I blamed men, blamed marriage, blamed the whole bleeding world,

Mute marriages: the ten-ton block of ice obstructing the throat, the heart, the red filter of the liver, the clogged life.

"...a frozen memory, like any p… where nothing is missing, not even… and especially, nothingness..."… —Julio Cortázar, “Blow Up” Mirror-mad,

And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. —William Blake Because I would not admit that I had nurtured

I pass to the other side of the pa… —Pablo Neruda On the other side of the page where the last days go, where the lost poems go,

I am the Sphinx. I am the woman buried in sand up to her chin. I am waiting for an archaeologist to unearth me,

The decorum of fire... —Pablo Neruda We learned the decorum of fire, the flame’s curious symmetry, the blue heat at the center of the…

For David Karetsky (April 14, 19… Putting the skis down in the white snow, the wind singing, the blizzard of time