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Spell the speil of cause and effect, Ride the long rail of fact after fact; What curled the plume in the drake’s tail And put the white ring round his neck?

Grace on which we fix our gaze; pillar of light that is her lithe, gymnast’s body.      You and I have already crossed the threshold on which she pauses— how beautiful the naked foot poised in air.      We’ve already entered the sexual dark and now stare back at her, still standing there as if she could…

And if I respect in her a deliberate beauty, that of an owl’s matted pellets fallen to the roots beneath its nest, more in her than perhaps is, where an unassuming friend of mine, not I, asks for her hand, then in the succession of pines to hardwoods, in generations, in once-hunted bones falling from…

Dream ended, I went out, awake To new snow fallen in the dark, Stainless on road and field; no track Lay yet on all my day of work. I heard the wild ones muttering, Assent their dark arrival made At dawn, gray dawn on dawn-gray wing Outstretched, shadowless in that shade, Down from high distances…

But I love you also in slow, dim-witted ways; we pass the slow afternoon hibernating together . . . one or two words spoken, and tears run down. The quivering wings of the winter ant wait so for winter to end; and there are tidal creatures who know whether the other is there or not;…

The habit of you lying next to me was so strong that for a year I slept with pillows on your side of the bed. When I turned in my sleep I put my arms around them or as I often had before, I turned away with my back against them; this habit of tides…

Sal delivers his four boxes of bananas just before we close. He tells me that because the temperature in Guatemala dipped down into the seventies for a couple of days Chiquita had come up 90,000 boxes short, “But I got my fruit ’cause I don’t shop around.” Sal gets a truck from Chiquita and Dole…

A man and a woman sit near each other. They do not long to be older, or younger, nor to be born in any other country, nor any other time. They are content to be where they are, talking or not      talking. Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not      know. The man sees…

The fountain around the soldiers’ and sailors’ monument, the mist from the splashing water, the Murat theater; it was there I waited for the young man I loved, hour after hour. Often he would not come. I leaned against the walls of a candy shop, boxes of rubber chocolates in the window, behind me buses…