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I turn from the mirror to the garden where the December rose grows up orange above the wall. Soughing the grasses chinked in and threaded on its top — the wind displaces the still life of a great turf, like Durer’s. The great gray rain comes slanting down interrupting the museum in my eyes. Ars…

                only partly accounted for by the old delivery truck laden with bread      that hums up the coastline highway                      the redtail hawks switch to and fro on the crosswinds, they           drift towards sunrise and sunset                            stitching the wind of the east to the wind of the west

I like the way wasps always put me in mind of washing, when the summer was bright and the shade fell in stripes from the shutters. Then the blood runs swift in its vessels, the spots on vipers’ skins seem sharper. Even brambles grow venomous, women stroll down to the shore to watch in the…

I meant to be neutral until I saw the doors battered with axes and the windows gone. I thought the town would be just a town, fountains, public buildings, throngs of shoppers, drinkers in the pubs. The party walls between houses stood, their fireplaces open to the sky; and groups of men in caps and…

The Greek takes Trixie on midnight walk, not much talk except she points skunk and he runs after it. Which started Trixie thinking, “Gee this guy’s different. Maybe I feel better if I let him move in.” When she finds out his love ever after stuff means give up stripjoints cut down drugs — He…

The air opens like an invisible flower; the petals of night and day embrace. In the very center a rock stares into itself. Wandering stars come to rest in the shape of a skull. Men and women rush barefoot to the peak, drying their eyes on their frozen clothes. Tears of summer, tears of winter…

Gladly they turned from the tragedy of six years gone to peaceful forests. Yet for many, old at twenty, life seemed phantasmagoric; and Cupid stumped on crutches. They took mint from the cold, cave-mouth springs and drank in the cool evenings, and drank in the warm afternoons, or dozed and dreamed, the ruined ladies, the…

In the garden a doe and fawn chew roses with pink geraniums. A grey three-legged cat lurching across the lawn freezes to sniff a gopher hole. Smooth as thin milk, a shiny snake flows into the ivy leaves. Lady-birds swarm in the air, like gnats. One living thing is still: a slimy slug, poor homeless…

That morning there was no sun, only a powder of strong light as if two suns were shining. We awoke in an armistice of colors, colors hiding in the depths of themselves, their white Sunday clothes. Came noon, the bearer of fruits that assuage no hunger. In the testicles, joy: the sign that somewhere the…