The great bed of the world arching over graves over Babi Yar with its multitude of bones, with battalions of screams

In the redwood house sailing off into the ocean, I sleep with you– our dreams mingling, our breath coming & going

Male? Female? God doesn’t care about sex & the long tree-shaded avenue

Smoke, it is all smoke in the throat of eternity. . . . For centuries, the air was full of… Whistling up chimneys on their spiky brooms

On the first night of the full moon, the primeval sack of ocean broke, & I gave birth to you

Old bag of bones upside down, what are you searching for in poetry, in meditation?

I sit at home at my desk alone as I used to do on many sunday afternoons when you came back to me,

What is the central passion of a life? To please mummy & daddy? To find a home for their furniture… To found a family of one’s own,

Next birthday I am thirty-six, & formed (for all intents & purposes) in tooth & claw.

Little egg, little nub, full complement of fingers, toes, little rose blooming

. .Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when… and tangled in a woman’s body? —Virginia Woolf Every month,

For centuries we have lain like this, our warmths intermingled, our hearts beating the same two-step,

I try to keep falling in love if only to keep death at bay.

We used to meet on this corner in the same wind. It fought us up the hill to your house,