this side of this side of paradise

Though she thought of her body as a mass of frailties, she, through a spiritual crises, joined the Catholic Church, and was at regular intervals. Like Freudian dreams, they must be old, moth-eaten London accents that are down on their luck. It was still a music, though, infinitely sorrowful.

Sunday broke stolid and respectable, and even the sea whose passionate kisses and unsentimental conversations she talked until midnight and then fell in a dreamless sleep, fell unwillingly asleep.

In her less important moments she returned to America, met the breach, beating back the tide, hearing from afar the crashing and aching limbs. For those minutes courage circling an end, twisting, changing pace, straight-arming violins swelled and quavered on the last notes, the girl dreaming on the music that eddied out of the cafes. New music at night, the sea; I don't catch the subtle things.

And so on in an eternal monotone that the spring was so purposeless and inconsecutive that it seems ANOTHER ENDING As in the story books, she ran into them, and on that half-dusky dreamy smell of flowers the ghost of a new moon lived. All the broken columns and clasped hands and doves could find nothing hopeless in having dead lovers, when they were exactly like the rest, seemed so beautiful. PARADISE meant to lose this chance.

There's so much spring in the air-- strength she drew down to herself when she knelt and bent her golden hair into the stained-glass light. never be a poet. I'm young. People excuse us now for our poses. (She looks at him once more, with infinite longing, finite sadness.)

(Brokenly) You'd better go hate me in a narrow atmosphere. I'd make you hate me. We can't have any more scenes like this.

thunder of cheers... finally bruised and weary, but still

Here the moon is bent just so; a crook in the wrist, the little girl's softest stretch of skin. The moon is framed by nothing. I am learning something new every day. That is to say, I am learning new ways to communicate his absence. A celestial body falls formless and only place dictates shape.

The words were forming themselves in my mouth. Come home.

Clouds cast
shadows long
and then longer
and then none.

Sometimes
I can still feel
teeth moving
inside my jaw.

A healthy head
is said to lose
one hundred
hairs a day.

My room self-
constructs these
tiny monuments
to him.

We thought about going back to the palmed path under fence; now only for barn cats and field mice. My knees remember the red lacing underneath skin. In the night we hear noises and know we are animals--we are not alone in the dark of the field. The ends of grass itch through cotton. The ends of grass touch me and touch you and touch other animals in the field. The moonlight erased the edges of the frame, leaving me with a yellow fading. I thought the stick was a snake. The stick jumped up and bit my leg.

sola gratia

First light is fleeting and
head-ache making.
Sweat pools in
the small of your back,
sticking like peach pits.

This morning finds
your skin three days
from ripe.

Time runs front to back
I know. Think of a
pitcher emptying; a
bed unmade; the waves
spread so thin
I am left with silence.

Every demand
is a demand
for what?

It's the last light that
traps into corners of
our room, bent slightly.
Prisms become one of
our more fluent languages.

I cannot say whether this map
is old or if it is only drawn to
appear so.

this pose can only be held for so long

Some statues go missing
pieces at a time and
we are left with imagined limbs.

I will not apologize
for your toothbrush left
next to mine, or for using it.