Could I unthink you, little heart, what would I do? throw you out with last night’s garbage,

It used to be hard for women, snowed in their white lives, white lies, to write books

Is God the one who eats the meat off the bones of dead people? —Molly Miranda Jong—Fast, age 3… God is the one, Molly,

I mourn a dead friend, like myself… —Pablo Neruda about César Vallej… I looked at the book. ‘It will stand,’ I thought. Not a palace

What is the central passion of a life? To please mummy & daddy? To find a home for their furniture… To found a family of one’s own,

You gave me a rose last time we met. I told myself if it bloomed our love would bloom,

We used to meet on this corner in the same wind. It fought us up the hill to your house,

A delicate border. A nonexistent… The train obligingly dissolves in… The G.I. next to me is talking wa… I don’t ‘know the Asian mind,’ he… Moving through old arguments.

I sit in the black leather chair meditating on the plume of smoke that rises in the air, riffling the pages of my life

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

You gave me the child that seamed my belly & stitched up my life. You gave me: one book of love poem… five years of peace

Knowing our lives a drowse towards death (attended by dogs & children) how can it not matter

I put our books face to face so they could talk. They whispered about us. I put yours on top of mine. They would not mate.

. .Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when… and tangled in a woman’s body? —Virginia Woolf Every month,

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