That conversation we were always on the edge of having, runs on in my head. At night the Hudson trembles in New Jersey light.

Good-by to you whom I shall see t… Next year and when I’m fifty; sti… This is the leave we never really… If you were dead or gone to live i… The event might draw your stature…

I come home from you through the e… flashing off ordinary walls, the P… the Discount Wares, the shoe-stor… of groceries, I dash for the eleva… where a man, taut, elderly, carefu…

This apartment full of books could… to the thick jaws, the bulging eye… of monsters, easily: Once open the… the underside of everything you’ve… the rack and pincers held in readi…

Living in the earth-deposits of ou… Today a backhoe divulged out of a… one bottle amber perfect a hundred… cure for fever or melancholy a ton… for living on this earth in the wi…

What kind of beast would turn its… What atonement is this all about? —and yet, writing words like these… Is all this close to the wolverine… that modulated cantata of the wild…

The rules break like a thermometer… quicksilver spills across the char… we’re out in a country that has no… no laws, we’re chasing the raven a… through gorges unexplored since da…

Either you will go through this door or you will not go through. If you go through there is always the risk

This is the grass your feet are pl… You paint it orange or you sing it… But you have never found A way to make the grass mean what… A cloud can be whatever you intend…

Your small hands, precisely equal… only the thumb is larger, longer—i… I could trust the world, or in man… handling power-tools or steering-w… or touching a human face... Such h…

Your dog, tranquil and innocent, d… our cries, our murmured dawn consp… our telephone calls. She knows—wha… If in my human arrogance I claim… her eyes, I find there only my own…

You, once a belle in Shreveport, with henna-colored hair, skin like… still have your dresses copied fro… and play a Chopin prelude called by Cortot: “Delicious reco…

If I lay on that beach with you white, empty, pure green water war… and lying on that beach we could n… because the wind drove fine sand a… as if it were against us

Whatever happens with us, your bod… will haunt mine—tender, delicate your lovemaking, like the half-cur… of the fiddlehead fern in forests just washed by sun. Your traveled,…