If we pull together, there’s harmony.

If alone, I breathe in. Pull a deep draft of liquor.

After-supper lure to bother with window blinds—

a string is all that’s needed for privacy for lovers, but do

You want to write. You want to write.

Tonight a sharp breeze from the river

or elsewhere. The trains run later

than expected, column of low whistle parting

clouds, and this new place is on a flight path

The cup

in your hand

that looks like a hand

feels to your fingers

just like a cup

Plot me: (x,0) (0,x) on the body

the body pumping: blood type O (one hopes) the body

processing: O (element)

Well-worn sea-eyed, that was the year of the Ox,

the year of the unknown (x), the placeholder (0)

strands of x’s and o’s placed in the impossible soft of your palms

I.

Descending frost to freshet, vernal-laved

deluging—Had we empty hands we’d shred

delphiniums and let the petals (frayed,

depleted), hard perfume the waterbed,

turn

There is nothing to be said about it.

Streamed wind and waterspray duetting hard

against the house. These days are clipped

from someone’s fowler’s snare—that is,

with cruel abandon, rags and bones (no heart).

ruby-throated, this

morning’s hummingbird

trembling at the yellow

voices beyond the wall,

Spanish, probably, the cast

of morning shadows, Friday,

I was in the hospital, having just delivered my second baby in 1970, when my husband showed up--these were the days when you actually were allowed to stay in the hospital a full two days -- my husband showed up with the galleys of my first story to be published. And that was the story that was going to be in Triquarterly.