Sweet muse with bitter milk, I have lain between your breasts, put my ear

Dear Colette, I want to write to you about being a woman for that is what you write to me. I want to tell you how your face

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 Jennifer Josephy On cold days it is easy to be reasonable, to button the mouth against kisses… dust the breasts

After the first astounding rush, after the weeks at the lake, the crystal, the clouds, the water… the snow breaking under our boots… & the long mornings in bed. .…

You hate the telephone but will not see me face to face so I am left beseeching you

Looking for a place where we might turn off the inner dialogue, the monologue of futures & regrets,

This constant ache is my leg’s message to me. ‘Hello. Hello. Hello. You’re getting there,' it says, ‘step by step.’

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,

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…

The whole world is flat & I am round. Even women avert their eyes, & men, embarrassed by the messy way

If it is only for the taking off– the velvet cloak, the ostrich feather boa, the dress which slithers to the fl… with the sound of strange men sigh…

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

The old poet with his face full of lines, with iambs jumping in his hair lik… with all the revisions of his body unsaying him,

If you ask him he will talk for ho… how at fourteen he hammered signs,… raw with cold, and later painted b… in ladies’ boudoirs; how he played… for two weeks in jail, and lived o…