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I loved to walk down to the café where she workedand stare at the menu with the Brains Beurre Noirhalfway down the page. She’d come to my tablewith her order pad, pleasant and placid, dressedall in white like a nurse, and her wonderful smell,strong and female, would enter me like a sword.When I used to…

In a waiting room at the Kresge Eye Center,my fingers trace the outline of money folded into pocketand I know the two hundred fifty dollars thereis made up of two hundred forty-five I can’t afford to spendbut will spend on a calm voice to tell mehow I am to be repaired. But legally blind and…

In the stories it’s different: grief,like the dark, lifts eventually—a tenderness inside which, with allthe clarity of bells when for once theyring like nothing but the ringing bellsthey are, it can seem that at last you’ve gotten away with something, likea horse you’ve stolen that, now, lighterthan ash on a sudden wind, or any windat…

Amped-up grid lights growl starsonto the hay-baled dirt ring onto blistered chrome and rust-lace,car-shells taped and painted over to resemble shapes of cars. We’rebleachered, gum-shoed, bleached by glare, laughing at ourselvesfor being here, spilling beer and sponging powdered sugarfrom our rumpled shirt-fronts, smiling. Rumbles in the air,our guts, the gears chunking and purring, the stands…

Between mud walls and the kivawind off the mesa broke his phrases,as we walked with Billy of the Parrot Clan and with others. The windowsmelting into blowing snow and the ripped-off split-level doors jammed on the adobes. Out of fleeting blue, then white,we caught bitesabout the time of killing Spaniards under the full moon,after the…

Of the many things that he used to say to me, there are twoI’m certain of: You taste like a last less-than-long summer afternoonby the shore just before September; and You’re the kind of betrayal, understand, I’ve been waiting for,all my life. When did remembering stop meaningto be lit from within—bodily— and the mind, briefly flickeringagain…

I’m resting on a bench in the cemeterywhile Ned scrawls his self-delighted wild-boy traceover the slopes of grass, but we can’t stay long, since it’s a day I need to go into the city,and when I stand up suddenly my left leg’s half a footlower than my right, because I’ve stepped into the sunken, newly…

The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts.No one hides a Tommy gun in its case.No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage. The last of the Hawai’ian queens translated the namegift that came here, while Portuguese historians translatejumping flea, the way a player’s fingers pick and fly. If you have a cigar…

This endless room is deep blue, dark red.I’m wearing my Valentino gown, vintage silhouettebut hand-stitched for me. It’s the same purpleas my favorite twilight, just as I requested. Everyone is here—I can see across the waythe black-rooted starlets and reality queensdrinking acai Cosmos. And I can see the disgracedcongressman studying his notes at the bar,…