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—for Kathleen Spivack I Dragonflies of the twenty thousand eyes, water-skaters, crickets whose tibiae hear, damselflies breathing through their rectum and jetting forward with each breath they take. This is the world of total and varied function she almost feels most for, and a force of decay like deity where an ancient garden's phlox leans…

for Helen I am not sure why I want to tell it, since the cup was not mine, and I was not there, and it may not have been white, after all. When I tell it, though, it is white, and the girl to whom it has just been given, by her mother, is eight….

Camus's illiterate charwoman mother was known for her “stunned silences.” The hopeless energy of raw work Demands a revolt against language. To clean impossible dirt day after day— How speak to God of endurance Except to tunnel into solitude, Shape from poverty a proud mask That speaks a stunned silence.

Daylight rounds corners like a whistler sick of melody, shooes mist from hedges, by noon blares orders like the nanny we quaked before: “No ma'am, I wouldn't dream of it ma'am.” Why shouldn't we dream if we like? Think of the donkey who day and night brays stridently for nothing as if nothing had to…

I had gone back to the old brown rambling school with its ancient test tubes, where I wanted to speak and the person I wanted to speak with was never there or had just stepped out. They knew me there, or it seemed      that way, though there were girls there now. One of them said…

Start in a farmer's field, his daughter gone forever this time, snow dusting the corn stalks, the abandoned Chieftain, coyote fur on the cattleguard. He hears what's not here, and the usual noises. Go under water. The world grabs the diver and breathes for him. He hears heartbeat. He hears the current dragging her sad…

I They knew how your good looks would bring men off the street and how a cave is a good place to linger invisibly— no, not you, you were to be out front, the three brothers inside waiting for wealthy victims, waiting tense as spiders. They promised you a cut. And we must remember that…

For Camille Our last fledgling launched into a churning flock of college freshpersons! Independence Day in September. Once we blow old feathers out of the house, Darling, think of all we can do: redecorate, travel, talk and make love without interruption, stoke bonfires with junk mail, find new jobs. Outside the car window, soybean fields…

Remember how you took me down to the dock in Michigan one night to show me stars, your latest hobby: the air was like ink, blue-black, and shadowless. The lamplight that we carried made the narrow boards bob at our feet, the small water warbling on either side. With the light out, lying on our…