I sit at my desk alone as I did on many Sunday afternoons when you came back to me, your arms aching for me,

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

A delicate border. A nonexistent… The train obligingly dissolves in… The G.I. next to me is talking wa… I don’t ‘know the Asian mind,’ he… Moving through old arguments.

You take me to the restaurant wher… plays God over a fish tank. The f… pace their green cage, waiting to… out of an element. Who knows what… There are thirteen in a tank meant

Ash falls on the roof of my house. I have cursed you enough in the lines of my poems & between them,

I want to understand the steep thi… that climbs ladders in your throat… I can’t make sense of you. Everywhere I look you’re there— a vast landmark, a volcano

There is a white wood house near… in whose garden the nightingale st… Though Keats is dead, the bird wh… returns with melodies, on easeful… A lock of hair the poet’s love rec…

Rising in the morning like warm bread, from a bed in America, the aroma

Sometimes the poem doesn’t want to come; it hides from the poet like a playful cat who has run

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

Cement up to the neck & my head packed with unsaid words. A gullet full of pebbles, a mouth

You are the first muse who came to… The others began & ended with… or a glance or a kiss between stan… the others strode away in the poin… or were kicked out by the stiletto…

I began by loving women & the love turned to bitterness. My mother, the bitter, whose bitter lesson–

What makes a poet? Many have tried to guess. Is it a voice like a conduit, a plainspokenness to grief,

All over the district, on leather… & brocade couches, on daybeds & ‘professional divans,’ they… The air is thick with it, the ears of analysts must be stick…