The whole world is flat & I am round. Even women avert their eyes, & men, embarrassed by the messy way

The cover of the book is astral violet, & within it are poems, most of them

When the devil brings him, like a Christmas puppy, examine his downy fur & smell his small paws for the scent of sulphur.

Cement up to the neck & my head packed with unsaid words. A gullet full of pebbles, a mouth

The women he has had are all faces without eyes. He has entered them blind as a cut worm. He has swum their oceans

‘Death is our eternal companion,’… —Carlos Castaneda My death looks exactly like me. She lives to my left,

Dear Colette, I want to write to you about being a woman for that is what you write to me. I want to tell you how your face

The first snow of the year & you lying between my breasts in my husband’s house & the snow gently rising in my… like guilt,

Male? Female? God doesn’t care about sex & the long tree-shaded avenue

Looking for a place where we might turn off the inner dialogue, the monologue of futures & regrets,

I am happiest near the ocean, where the changing light reminds me of my death & the fact that it need not be…

I began by loving women & the love turned to bitterness. My mother, the bitter, whose bitter lesson–

If it is impossible to promise absolute fidelity, this is because we learn so much geography from the shifting of one body

Exploring each other’s depths, that surge of connection which makes the world seem sane,

This is the dirty laundry poem– because we have traveled from town… accumulating soiled linen & sw… & blue-jeans caked & clott… & teeshirts crumpled by our gl…