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Red snapper with tabouli, I tucked the napkin into my drink. Smooching broke out at the next table. I am talking a luncheon language to a Lebonese architect posing as a recently divorced Finn in the Peachtree Center. Red snapper, until the species cannot afford summer vacations, lunching on the bottom, farming among the lower…

Blue animal in a blue affluence, silver-blue ocean mammal pointing in a green-blue sea towards a thin sparkle, the far surf in the sun. You're one with an intimate language: the possible loneliness of no-one-to-talk-to. Swimming out, somersaulting in the salt, your destination: lone dolphin, X, meet fellow speaker, Y.

I would walk The snowy miles To your house, Not quite as far As presidents In legends walk To go to school; Nonetheless, Something was School-marmish About you Who had never heard The names of certain Sports figures, Television actors, Popular singers, Famous race horses. And I was not surprised To learn that as a…

Past the turpentine camps, brilliant green lamps held by woozy militia men, the car with a nose of its own, with headlight-eyes, sniffs through the mountain fog, heart palpitating, belly hungry for gasoline pancakes. Ghettos rave in their sleep, butchering alto solos, harvesting white snakes. The car, evermore threadbare, feels lost on Chevrolet Avenue, a…

who carries wood across a virgin half-acre of snow towards a door in a house made of wood, imagine his pleasure hearing the crunch of each footstep, his boot contrapuntal through a sub-freezing patina. Also, his stronger pleasure hearing the wind sing an aria full of winter: white, white, opera in a blizzard. . ….

Sharing spice cake and green tea, Around the round table In the walled garden, The man with the thick black hair And the seated women in blue Have something in common. It's not the rings on their fingers Or the gold in their teeth, Or that they share the same flatwear And plates of bone…

“Before placing me on your shelf, please take me by the feet and give me a few hard shakes to help restore that ‘just made’ look. Thank you.” I have been carrying these instruc­ tions around in my pocket for weeks, pulling them out at odd moments. I found them on the street and I…

So many churches against the sky, a small view beyond where a corner of the sea converges with an even smaller landscape, the spit less than motionless, as in a dream where there's flame but not fire, where a child's cap blows slowly across the street, where the land ends where the street ends, and…

I took for the dawn The steelmills of Gary Burning their corner of the night. But I was wrong. Dead wrong. At four am the sky takes on These willful transformations. To keep awake, I sing off-key The fading staticky tunes, A dj's voice a thousand miles near. My life has never been more In…