Endless duplication of lives and o… —Theodore Roethke I have known the imperial power of… the awesome indifference of recept… I have been intimidated by desk &a…

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

You sleep in the darkness, you with the back I love & the gift of sleeping through my noisy nights of poetry. I have taken other men into my tho…

Regret is the young girl who sits… & stares at her hands. They are bluer than shadows in sno… They are bloodless as fear. Her fingernail moons are white.

Because my grandmother’s hours were apple cakes baking, & dust motes gathering, & linens yellowing & seams and hems

I sit at my desk alone as I did on many Sunday afternoons when you came back to me, your arms aching for me,

Now, moving in, cartons on the flo… the radio playing to bare walls, picture hooks left stranded in the unsoiled squares where pain… and something reminding us

Goddess, I come to you my neck wreathed with rosebuds, my head filled with visions of inf… my palms open to your silver nails… my eyes open to your rays of illum…

You take me to the restaurant wher… plays God over a fish tank. The f… pace their green cage, waiting to… out of an element. Who knows what… There are thirteen in a tank meant

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

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

You call me courageous, I who grew up gnawing on books, as some kids

The great bed of the world arching over graves over Babi Yar with its multitude of bones, with battalions of screams

I love to go to sleep, When bed takes me like a lover wrapping my limbs in cool linen, soothing the fretfulness