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Some Comfort

Two straight days of sun and the idiot magnolia opens Boston, to cleanse it, pull the bullet of winter. I feel better. The bodies in the river thaw to neon fish, and clouds, sculling. There’s no telling when it will snow again. Blossoms are words in the long-winded streets: landed absences, long-distance calls for relief….

Silent Letters

A. There was a man, Agur, toward the end of Proverbs. He wasn't a very important man. Maybe he was a failed prophet, these things happen. He wasn't very bright – a mesomorph, chunky and tough, not cut out to be a prophet at all, not good with signs, a stumbler, no king. As though…

My Malaria

Don’t worry about my tongue being a biscuit of dust. Don’t think about my pillow which is filled with quinine. I don’t. My malaria is not contagious, nor is it hereditary. Why do I walk bent over like this? Because when they operated to remove my malaria, and found nothing, they became bitter and sewed…

Involving a Risk

Nights flex. You occur to me like morning’s sketchy moon: a surprising intimate. I lapse into you delirious as a drive into rain. Something you say is your hand, opening, inside me. You have to sleep alone to dream. . . Who can remember, counting backwards, the logic of snow. Leaves shake their fists, the…

Oreana

on Lake Titicaca Era of Giant Tapirs she stepped out of her craft Oreana her skin the deep sheen of gold with weird webbed feet & hands embraced the Boss Tapir *     *      * thus we began who have two breasts like her & intelligence & a womb like hers & a tool like the tapir’s…

The Corrected Works

(for Lynne) 1. My fingers will not function when your eyes are closed. They stop at the letters of your shrugging shoulders; your clothes whisper: “There are words better left alone.” At odd hours I rob you blind and hurry home carrying the ill-gotten loot as if it were the history of future civilizations. I…

Voice From Danang

After we had burned on the water a while, amid the chopper-borne shouts, flares, and thrashing rope ladders, we put into quiet, dark rooms. I couldn’t touch you through my walls – my nails screeled into chines. Why had they bored lights in me like that? You must have known we were set on sand….