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A Dream for an Opera

The last tug at the sleeve lets her blouse fall off shoulders to breasts that have never seen a lover, she shudders, shakes so hard I touch the bones inside the song of this afternoon to stop the loud way our fear of us rattles her in the flutter of bugs so fragile they can…

A Christmas Letter

I was in Florence, Italy, when my father died. It was Easter Sunday and I was staying with old friends, the Marchettis, in their apartment near Piazza delle Cure, a quiet neighborhood on the north edge of town that you entered from via Faentina. We hadn’t gone into the center for the big Easter celebration,…

What Is Left Here

Out in the open, there is a cowshed. There are the expected gaps and hornets. Here lives our story, where we used to meet— You smelled like hay, were always listening to some other sound, the buzzing of your own ideas chasing us down. You began building a staircase out of thorny branches, then a…

Provincetown

This undistinguished        shingled        condominium is closer to Route Six than to the sea so that muffled sound we hear is cars, not waves. The occupants of the adjacent unit are often in the driveway keyboarding in cars. No one is keyboarding, of course, at dawn when I leave for the beach so I can beat…

Sweet Disposition

Thoughts have gone wolf again, hunting for reasons in the dark. Suppose we were never               supposed to fall into each other’s arms? Made a bone-boat tossed all our memories in—               watched it sail. There’s a chance I know nothing and I…

The Invisible Book

Sometimes when I’m reading, I’m distracted by the invisible book underneath the book I’m actually reading and the problem is this: it’s better. It’s like the superball under the couch that your fingertips barely brush: the slightest contact and it’s gone, gliding easily away, because its form is nearly perfect, there, a sphere in the…