We sit on a rock to allow our souls to catch up with us. We have been traveling a long time.

Driving me away is easier than saying goodbye– kissing the air,

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

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

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

On a darkening planet speeding toward our death, we pierce a rosy cloud & hit clean air,

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

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…

Meathooks, notebooks, the whole city sky palely flaming & spectral bombs hitting that patch of river I see from my eastern window.

I love to go to sleep, When bed takes me like a lover wrapping my limbs in cool linen, soothing the fretfulness

In the glass-bottomed boat of our lives, we putter along gazing at the other world under the sea– that world of flickering

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