In the chest is caged bat who seeks escape through the mouth. He flaps his wings & the molars shiver.

With his head full of Shakespeare… and old notions of poetic justice, he was ready with his elegies the day the ocean sailed into the… ‘The sea,’ he wrote, 'is a forgivi…

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

In Autumn, as in Spring, the sap flows, the sap wishes to race against heartbeats

‘Hotel rooms constitute a separate… —Tom Stoppard A bed, a telephone, the cord to the world beyond the womb . . .

Because my grandmother’s hours were apple cakes baking, & dust motes gathering, & linens yellowing & seams and hems

I sit in the black leather chair meditating on the plume of smoke that rises in the air, riffling the pages of my life

I hear you will not fall in love w… because I come without a guarantee… because someday I may depart at wh… and leave you desolate, abandoned,… If that’s the case, what use to be…

Black ship of night sailing through the world & the moon an orange slice tangy to the teeth of lovers who lie

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…

I put our books face to face so they could talk. They whispered about us. I put yours on top of mine. They would not mate.

Handcuffed by time, I travel across this broad beautiful America– mesas, deserts, peaks with clouds caught

Unable to bear the uncertainty of the future, we consulted seers, mediums, stock market gurus,

Not wanting to write for fear that anything– the passion for the page, the love of carbon ribbons & e… will distract me from your face,

This is the dirty laundry poem– because we have traveled from town… accumulating soiled linen & sw… & blue-jeans caked & clott… & teeshirts crumpled by our gl…