·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

Welcome all the new folks that have kindly come this way
from Jonathan Mayhew’s new link! If you are looking for the
story about my mom and her story of the peach, scroll down to
the next journal entry - or continue beyond for a variety
of other kinds of poems,politics and commentary. More specific
searches (Sappho, Walking Theory, or Dolores Park, for example,
gotten through a “search”).
What follows is a somewhat longish walk - so, as they say,
stroll along. Will appreciate any comments via the email bar
info to the left here.
	
*
Walk (San Francisco) – Sunday, June 26, 2005
	
Walk from home to 24th – coffee & scone – 
	
      To walk with
	
Up 24th to Diamond to Romero cross
	
Market to Rooftop down Corbett to Clayton
	
Up Clayton, up the Pemberton Steps 
	
to Twin Peaks Drive, up steps to Tank Hill:
	
Pink Triangle
	
    Pink Cunt
	
The canvas floats suspended 
	
   Down Twin Peaks
	
Transparent, unveiled barely through the thin, partially lifted, close fog:
	
Gay Pride weekend in the City
	
Don’t they know my father’s dead
	
And I am risen to look over the Bay
	
   Over the City?
	
(And why would any, any way?) 
	
Slants of various silvered light across the bay to the east
	
Waters that he once sailed, competitively 
	
Boats, dark buoys & fierce youth:
	
Amazing how one accounts a history in one image:
	
Walk through bereavement
	
Walk through, walk amongst
	
One ghost goes, one comes back
	
  A tisket, a tasket, a task:
	
To sit on these craggy rocks
	
Drizzling fog on fingers that write: 
	
“Purple Perennial
	
           Lily Family
	
“Ithuriel’s Spear”
	
       (The white cross inside the flower
	
             The pistil)
	
First named in “Paradise Lost”, the signage posted on the fence 
	
over a lavender meadow -  gentle,  vibrant petals, open - 
	
shifting in bunches -  a short way, down the cliff:
	
    Write something down
	
    A Blue Jay leaves its rock:
	
An eyeball demands clarity
	
  Before death, after death
	
Let it be known, he wants to say
	
   There is none.
            *
Tank Hill down Twin Peaks to Clayton to 17th
	
To the stairs up Ashbury Heights to Terrace
	
Down Terrace into Corona Heights 
	
The trail up the rocks over the cap and down
	
The amazing gray bellied hawk – feathers slightly a-twist -
	
Atop the pine on the north – a fearless mocking bird attacks –
	
The hawk shifts his head to repel, regains a silence 
	
I sit down to look up and share:
	
Down the hill into Randall Park, the
	
Lower level, the community garden in wooden boxes and barrels: 
	
Note the highflying artichokes – crowns and purpling leaves –
	
Next to the basketball courts – down to State Street
	
Down the steps to Eureka to Market down Market
	
To Castro to 18th:
	
    ‘The “C” Club
	
    Comedy, Clits, Cake’
	
A poster on a pole, women’s faces
	
18th Street, a little below Castro.
	
                *
Stop to shop for oats at Bi-Rite, the grocery
	
“Spay Free Blueberries from the Bi-Rite Family Farm”
	
 hand-inked, white label overlooks the berries in little gray baskets:
	
Vigilant, amused, I show management (ha ha) the missing “R”:
	
         *
One block up Guerrero her breasts in profile 
	
against an open, black iron gate
	
The lavender blouse
	
Dark flowering bougainvillea 
	
Her almost odd, ceramic, white flesh:
	
*
The poet’s widow in a lemon top
	
A little pigeon-toed
	
Wanders down the hills of this Valley
	
Smiles rhythmically to each passerby
	
Perpetually, it appears, wounded and alone:
	
I know the woman from long ago
	
I cannot bring myself to say hello. 
	
Home to Sandy’s garden, roses in full wheel
	
Rose, white and yellow
	
The flowers I can never fully name:
	
Absence is presence:
	
Father, gradually, an unfolding flame.
	

Friday evening I went to Richmond to have dinner and visit with my mom - who is now 89. When young her aspiration was to be a writer - in fact, during her twenties and thirties, she wrote and published both short stories and articles. However, fate and four children, led her, and eventually my father into urban and environmental politics. Most of her writing went into citizen research and policy statements. Yet, now in her waning years, she continually expresses disappointment that she did not fulfill her dream to become known as a writer - going as far to discount her considerable accomplishments as an activist politician.
So, this particular evening, rather than again listen to this reoccurring lament, I decide to dust off my old skills as a creative writing teacher to see if we can still get something out of her!
While she sits on the couch, I claim a ripe peach from the kitchen, turn off the PBS News Hour, and put the fruit into the gentle grip of her hands. Since it’s hard for her to still manually write, I open my journal and pull out my pen to transcribe:
I start with a simple question:
“Mom, how would you describe the peach?”
“It has very formal outside,” she says, slowly sliding one of her hands around it its circumference. “It is outlined very carefully. It is not irregular. The colors are lovely, soft and expanding into the whole operation.”
“Do you mean out into the world?”
“No. I am not trying to go outside the limits of what I know about. I see predominantly a deep rose. Underlying it is a smattering of gold.
It has the softness of a rose. When you touch it, it is very accommodating. It calls you right in. It’s a happy peach.”
“Do you want to compare the peach to anything?”
“I don’t want to compare it. Just from being out in the light, heat and the very cold weather we have had, the exterior is harsh looking. You know something has happened to the peach. It’s been out in the world, just like what happens to very young men.”
She pauses to look at the base of the fruit.
“Down here at the bottom,” she continues, “It is smooth and delightful. But when you get up to the higher part, its own significance is not that important. It’s waiting for someone else to come and do something else to it - different than its first go around. In its first go around, there were no indications. Now there are indications of things they want to do, things that they will do, and things nice to have done. I know from having studied other pieces of fruit that they will do things that are significant - they shine in the sun. They make the passerby recognize them, all of which adds to the glory of the fruit. Some will get more glorious than others.”
My mother pauses. While she’s talked, she has continued to palm the sides of the peach.
“Am I getting too bookish,” she looks at me, smiles and asks, almost a combination of pleasure and embarrassment by her outlay.
I laugh. She pauses again.
“Is this a classroom project. Is this what you do? Where do you this?”
“I’m doing it right here, Mom.”
I read her back the piece. She does not comment. She smiles and looks pleased with herself. As I am. Indeed, it is sweet to hear her without complaint.

Ron Silliman recently suggested in his blog that a Collected Beverly Dahlen is already long overdue - and I would agree. Today, Chris Murray, on her tex-files brought attention to a passage from “A Reading: 1 - 7″, the first in a series of books call “A Reading” of which I published the first one at Momo’s Press in 1985:

the Ace is like a big heart blooming out there. and I could wish all my days to be bound each to each. by natural piety. whatever that is, she wrote these things are of nature. trees, rocks, flowers, a desert. have a desert, have an ocean. think of living down there, there would be other fish swimming around, strange plants growing. that too would be nature, let’s not be too hasty to define it. there’s a thin moving line. blurred edges. if it were there as sharply as Blake wanted who would get over the boundary in the middle of the night. they were living close to the border in northern Italy, ‘we need some new genes’ he said. he remembered the nor and thought I was Norwegian, someone from the north originally. someone, a Svenska-Suomalainen.
all that was a foreign language, something she was learning. Navajo. o my horse. the corn of the east. somewhere over the rainbow. blue skies. it’s shaping up and I wasn’t even thinking about it. it grows. hard and soft, she wrote. hard buds, nipples of buds. hardening. I take you. his
oleander. his skinny, the slight boy’s brown body.
‘the brown boy’s slight body.’

(In the non-virtual world, the above text is justified to the right margin!)

Peter Gannick’s “Pots & Poets” (Sp?), and Charles Alexander’s Chax Press published the other two volumes of “A Reading”. And Elizabeth Robinson’s Press (name) will be publishing a new volume in about a year. I would seek out these books, as well.

Beverly - one of the founders - with Frances Jaffer and Kathleen Frazer - of the journal How(ever) (sp?), is a contemporary of George Stanley, and definitely one of the central figures (tho many years quiet until recently) of the San Francisco poetry world. Among many, Beverly is one of those diamonds in the rough that will increasingly rise to fill a significant place on the late 20th century literary horizon. Like Niedecker she has kept correspondence with many of her significant peers and elders (Oppen, Duncan, Rachel Blau Duplessis, Stanley, among others), much of her literary life has been counter-careerist.

I do still have copies of a Reading 1 - 7. For $12 I will be happy to provide any and all with a copy - postage and handling included. Send checks to me at:

3514 21st Street
San Francisco CA 94114

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area on August 20, I will be reading with Beverly at the Grand Street series in Oakland on that Sunday evening.

From today’s Senate Hearing with Mr. Rumsfeld:

“Perhaps referring to declining support for the war, Mr. Rumsfeld mentioned the dark days of the American revolution in 1776, and quoted President Lincoln, who told Americans during the Civil War in 1864: ‘There may be mistakes made sometimes, and things done wrong, while the officers of the government do all they can to prevent mistakes. But I beg of you as citizens of this great republic, not to let your minds be carried off from the great work we have before us’.” (NY Times, today on the web edition)

Am I confused? Rumsfeld and Company imitating Honest Abe! I know Iraq is hemispherically south of Washington. But I don’t think the Administration has ever previously given the impression that the United States went to war there because Iraq had succeeded from the Union (and/or implied that we were in a Civil War, other than maybe provoking one). Wow! What could be the similarities? Cotton and Oil?

“Things are getting better all the time” or “I want to get out of this place” What will be the song, Mr. President? This is all getting very painful and bleak.
Needless to say, this war -as perhaps most wars - is a disaster in all respects unless say you are one of Dick Cheney’s Defence Contractors - Halliburton, et al, who are eating up the American taxpayer alive - let alone the country’s soul.

Arrested by the pleasures
Of being singular and alone –
Not particularly:
On a desert mountain she writes her novel
Rakishly
And sees no one. The feather quick hit –
Fingers to the keyboard – is small provision:
An inhabitation in letters
Is variously good but this is not a lecture.
The day’s sun trowels my shoulders.
At night I dream my late father has now
Fully evacuated the house, each room
A dark emptiness, a vacant breeze, the doors
Squeak among loose hinges. As the sun rises,
The floorboards - already ripped away from crossbeams -
The earth below, a rich, dark brown, loose loam,
Fit to give over, fresh for planting.

This morning - rereading Zukofsky’s “A-22″ & remembering sitting with Cid Corman in Kyoto one warm July afternoon (1988) on the patio outside a coffee shop near the front of the Ryoanji Temple entrance. The way his hands held the paperbound early editions of “A” (perhaps, “A 1 - 12″) - the open pages fully engaged with penciled notes, wrinkled from years of reading and rereading - as if, I thought then, in possession of a sacred instrument - and Cid’s expressed commitment to write an exhaustive interpretation of Z’s work.

Did that work ever see the light of “published” day? I do not know. Someone suggested that Corman - in years subsequent to my visit with him - had learned something that betrayed his belief in Z’s integrity. What could that have been? Does anyone read anymore with that kind of fidelity for any 20th century writer? Or - as a requirement, almost Biblical in nature - must that fidelity be reserved for Emily Dickenson, Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, etc?

Also, yesterday, while reading Philip Whalen’s Kyoto notebooks (1969 - 1970) in the Bancroft Library I found evidence of meetings between the two (Corman & Whalen), but not enough to register any kind of depth in those encounters. One suspects two giants - occasionally rubbing shoulders and figuring ways to continue to connect with American literary life - while both lived in enormous social isolation. (One suspects a similar distance between Jack Spicer and Whalen in San Francisco in the 50’s).
Philip’s Kyoto journals - in addition to the daily attentions - are full of reflections on many political and material aspects of American life - railing about capitalism, protestantism, etc. - combined with many loving dream childhood episodes of being with his family in Oregon. Interesting to also note his interest in Wallace Stevens and Dame Edith Sitwell - a joy in Dylan Thomas’s stories and disinterest in the sound of his “clattering” verse. And great drawings - caricatures - with colored inks and often hilarious commentary on the visual content. But also obviously a psychically hard, sometimes harrowing time, figuring out where he can ever fit either into an American life (literary, at least) and/or a full acceptance - the initiation and commitment - into a Buddhist religious vocation:

30:VIII:69

Wasp in the bookshelves rejects
Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily
Dickenson, the Goldiard Poets, A vedic
Reader, Lama Govinda, Medieval French
verses & romances, Long Discourse of the
Buddha and the Principal Upanishads.
The window glass reads more enter-
tainingly, but soon she leaves that for
the fox tail grass the camellia hedge the
dull mid-morning sun.

Philip Whalen, Kyoto Notebook (Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California)
It is interesting to me now how the journal form (& now the blog) renders up - or can - the geological under-scape of an artist’s life - the slow, meandering, the lost parts, the inner-boilings and sufferings without form, so many vague shadows on the wall - all of which precede the formulations found in the well made poem and/or the release of a sequence. I suspect it’s the “successful” artist/poet’s anguish to have his or her life utterly & perpetually read in journals (even blogs) and confused with the delight and order found in finished works. Such deceptions! And yet, to be honest, most often, my journal is at the origins of most of my work - it’s where I make my form of sketching, some sketches of which become basis of a larger, or finished poem, most often worked out - these days - on my computer’s monitor.

Needless perhaps to say, the journal is full of much that never finds any greater fruition as poems, surviving mainly as, at best, a kind of tempting spillage, batter for potential bread. Today, for example, and I finish with this, I found myself spontaneously saying and writing down:

“Someone writes about the character of redemption as the ’soldier of love’.”

I have no idea where that sentence came from or “where”, if anywhere, it will work out in my life and/or writing. We are obviously continually immersed in a constant experience of diverse phenomena - and it’s probably a hooker’s guess as why one writer or other chooses to amalmagate one set of phenomena or another and according to what “form”. On several other blogs, for example, there is a kind of cliche “hip” approach to Clark Coolidge’s methodoogy, that it is driven by his experience as a jazz drummer. I don’t doubt that the experience there was informitive. but who can read Coolidge who also has read Zukofsky and not see a transparent influence that is as obvious as day.

This blog piece, in itself, a revisited and refined reincarnation of a blog piece about Whalen’s Journals in U.C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library that I entered over a year ago. In and of itself, there in the Reading Room - now closed with the Building for the upcoming retrofit - such a lovely experience.

I gather roses before Solstice
For my mother, 89. Together
We write an acrostic for my friend,
Amy Trachtenberg, now
Turning 50. I say the letter,
She imagines the word:

Attendant
Merciful
Young

True
Rain
Attitude
Comfort
Heaven
Tingle
Everywhere
Never
Baby
Excellent
Ready
God

Alternatively I read aloud to her
“The Tibetan Book of the Dead.”
“I don’t understand a thing you are saying”
She says, “But I like the sound of the words.”
“Do you accept God?” I ask.
“I am not one to accept anything
I cannot touch, feel or see,
And know to be true.”

We look at the high, alabaster vase,
A flotilla of unfurling petals, blush pink,
and white. “Do you like the roses, Mom.”
“Oh, yes. Aren’t they beautiful?
Don’t you love them?”

Thank you for your interest in “Sleeping With Sappho”! I am most appreciative of the enormous number of visits to this site and the many compliments received! Sappho’s flame - over all these centuries - does seem unquenchable. For those who want more - and I have added a few more here today - please go to the faux Press ebook edition at:
http://www.fauxpress.com/e/vincent/
That edition includes work not represented on the blog.
The entire manuscript includes 217 poems, including fragments - the entirety of which now begins to search for the right book publisher. Any suggestions or queries will be appreciated!

Alright, some new ones and - if this is your first visit - keep scrolling down to the previous two blog entries - for more:

54.

]
Up from hell with a tiny black purse
]
]

55.

]
Wisteria breathes
Against my face
You will come my way
One breath at a time.
]
]

56.

What city boy knocks you on your ass
His buckle half way down to his knees
Sure that your dress will rise higher
Than your knees?
58.

I
Tender my lips:
Presents kept from parents
The guttural muffled trumpet
The fresh skin around my breasts

Unbearably dark hair
Goat thighs
Elk vagina

I did everything
Impossible as Acacia & allergies
Bleeding the noses around us
What is released
Goes to a deeper
What falls in a wild Iris

As much as I love the rough butch
Shadows and shade do not repel me.

59.

]
]
new losses

bitter

59.

Disabused, totally,
Nevertheless
A cancelled issue
Warps a wanted pattern:

Call me once more
Don’t turn it into a struggle
The flame within
Cradle shadows on a red wall
Take me.

60.

Blew it
For what?

61.

Rope the Oak tree
Brave one

Gather bitter lemons
And then some

And for you
Lay away

Shut up
Speak to no one

I will arrive
Rude, crude

You will be the last,
Burnished.

62.

Lie down
On an alabaster pillow

Little devil, take my
Pleasure blended as a pearl

I will give you
Into a bed of small gods

Tiny features in their faces

Dimples and seizure.

63.

White dream
You come in a stream

Asleep, little devil, no pain
You would adhere lightning to water

The blessings shower and curl my hair,
Your hair and the hair of God’s witness

You are no toy, nor am I:
Hear the oars paddling.

64.

Pussy
Forget it absolutely
No cats

A goat,
well, the goat!

65.

To Stephanie
Over there, a limited estate
And no companions
And, what can I say,
Prowling the coastline
A harpoon without pity
She rides a horse
With silk on the saddle.

66.

That fertile god
Filling me

She swears against love
Not even the simplest reason

I am set on the destruction
Of my own sweat and invention.

67.

Yes
Those

Less
Gone

More sorrow.

68.

Not that
Liberated goat

I would not have killed
Then or now

The irrational
Is no excuse for sacrifice.

68.A

Since I am still home
Convex by concave
The mirror within innocence
Alexandra
Ignored and rough tender
Get a kick in the rear
Join no one:
Narcissus still virgin
Is awfully - note him there
By the still pool –
Awfully cranky.

68.B

Bend over,
Sweetly

69.
]
]rapturous
]

70.

Stay home

The Marine Harmonica

Only plays for new wars

A guttural comb pinched with spit

The community is down to one solo.

Overwhelming demand compels to put up more Sappho pieces! I hear she’s not unhappy with the attention. No, she is not using a cell-phone. Someone says that one can tell by the way “the language bristles”. I will accept that. Kindly. Here goes:

2.

Gone from her: jagged alabaster underfoot
No ripe peach orchard
No cedar glow no candle lit
No amber flame

Boiled saltwater percolates steam into
Wilted roses into rank deadheads
What was radiant glimmers nowhere
No sleep will warm her breasts

The goat’s kids chomp the grass bare
Sacrifice without honor
Like hard dry pomegranate skin
The wind goes so still

In Crete no one will take you up:
Offered small jade glass cups
Turn acrid water across the tongue
Into one’s funeral, love’s loss.

16.

Some women dream rabbit, three in shadow,
Three in light
And there are others who only a wolf inside the door
Few dream what hates

Hard to confuse many by one
For the woman, call her Carrie,
Who stays constant, leaves no one

Behind the door, silken among roses
Yes to her lover and yes again
No to abandonment, no
To the rabbit’s fondling fur

In a dark
lightly

The silhouette
She who arrives

16.Alt.

One woman says a soldier with a goat
Another says a soldier with a fox
And I say it is rarely the one you are with
But how you hold new love in your arms

It is difficult not to be confused
I have been defeated by many
Less beautiful (Sylvia)
Who found me not

Nor would she sail to Crete
For me nor our other lovers
Nor did she offer clear wine or Iris –

Out on her own

The dark
Her shadow faint

I must forget everyone:

Why she would not rather see my wanting face
The cut light across the peach in my hand:
Rather the fat soldier exiled from Ithaca
Routed and scarred purple by Odysseus

] may that she not return
]
] part my arms
]
] outward
]
] expectant

27.

]
]
]
]no, old man
]don’t speak
]don’t terrify us
]the proximity [death

Each fears a funeral. Do you
know this? Please, delay the calling,
tell the reaper to bury the iron tool

]may we have new gods
]men, women, children
fresh on the porch, above the step.

30.

]noon

Guys
Morning to night
Refuse to take a look
Even with the lupine bushes in our hair
And the occasional slap you give me on the butt
We should take to a room and fall asleep
Or wrap our arms around old men drunk
Already fast asleep on the City’s benches
]
If there is a bird in anybody’s pants
It’s lost its beak.

31.

She is neither equal nor a god
She is perhaps most like you
Mute, overlooking the cliff
There’s no sugar on her tongue

A rasp for a whisper
Shakes nothing loose in my heart
I look away, desperate
Where is someone I can speak to?

Yes, the one with the pomegranate jewel
Bright red in her dark hair:
I am no longer blinded
There are honey hives in my ear

A chill separates from my skin
Released, marble turns liquid
Copper and white
If I look closely there is a bleeding

What cuts close to the bone
A swallow – kind – in the breathing.

44.
Andrew
The joker dropped
Melissa a dead letter
]
Out of Delphi - without a prayer
Indelicate Jane confuses seaweed with rope -
Burnt. Copper anklets and starched jeans
Without smell, varnished tools
Or white plates spare and smooth.
So she shut up. Soon after, her mother caved in.
No one hears anything, travel a naysayer.
Then, the daughters of Athena released the horses
Studs each gripped by the legs of Epidore’s finest
The young men with taut ribbed torsos
That they would climb mountains, traverse rivers, ravines

]unlike to us
]not particular to the gods

To arrive Attica
What is bitter in the tambourine and snare
Ill-fitted to the false speech of outsiders
]
A chorus in which no one transforms the anguish:
Such sad, mean sounds
The streets filled with broken bricks
Folded down, broken statuary
Bitterroot and dry compost
The young on their horses in tears
The women in shredded pink silk
No one can call on anyone, absolutely
No one. The instruments fail. Every eye
And chin dropped: an ode for infinite loss,
Infinite forgiveness.

***
As always, appreciate your comments. Email info in the side bar.

I am revisiting my “Sleeping with Sappho” manuscript with the intent of soon submitting it for book publication. Here’s a rather sustained bunch of short poems and fragments. I will appreciate your comments. my email address is on the column to the side of the blog.
Enjoy. Yes, Sappho does get cranky here. I am glad she wrote it all down.Think of the work that may have been totally lost if she owned a cell phone back there in BC.

108.B

]
Misshapen, fallen, muddied:
An older, yet so tender, swan.

109.

]
Go where you can receive.

110.

Her muse has such small hands
Pointed egret feather gloves
Hunters abound looking for them.

111.

Take up the floor, Jack

Rip it board by board

If you are not enough, get a gang:

Sylvia is approaching

Nothing equals what she’s cost

Let her – her tight waist turning –

Let her fall down

Let her fall way down.

112.

Heah, Geronicus, a divorce, just as you want
A contract with no deal breaker
And you got the space she wanted
No longer buckled over, straight up on your legs
Sweet as cool water, a smooth feel
In your crotch:
Eleanor got what you wanted, amiably.

113.

For every other girl on the block
And never again for you
Mr. Bridegroom
Never again for you.

114.

Old age

Old age

Why are you running toward me?

I have not come for you

I have not come for you.

115.

Why not?
The ex-housewife in sharp pink
Eliminates any comparison
To flat milk on a thin saucer
The cat with a pink tipped tongue
Sipping quickly I now compare thee.

116.A
Hello new bride
Hello groom
Make yourself at home:

I will go and corner the silk sheets.

116.B
Welcome back, lover
Welcome
And you? You, too.

117.

I hope this crushes you
That you never, ever, come back.

118.

I am not some old shellfish –
You, Sylvia, can still bang me to pieces.

132.

She has an ugly dog the color of mustard grass
Her nose constantly wet against Sylvia:
Even if it takes a small island far from Crete
She will be banished.

133.

Ginger refuses to talk.
Sylvia can care less.
The local gods are good for nothing.

134.

I woke up out of a deep dream.
I could not recover you anywhere,
Elena.

135.

When did his son pander to Oedipus?
The chill on his silver belt buckle
The flattened cheekbone.

136.

Forebode no winter:
Crow voice cut your volume
The bellow in your wings.

154.A

Mars a moment, then behind the cloud,
Illuminated, then not, the quality of despair.

154.B

When the sun rose – all rays –
We walked into it, ablaze.

155.A

A short, sustained hello to Julia, bubbling,
Gloria’s child.

155.B

Get going. Your age and wrinkles offer me nothing.

156.
]
]
Not as compelling as a harmonica in a riff,
silver, rather than gold.

156.Alt

]
you break the strings on my guitar
]
]
thin brass shavings, everywhere.

157.

Bad boy dusk

158.

To take in your svelte tongue:
fluttering.

158.Alt

With love animated under the heart,
swelling sorrow.

159.

Not I, not hate, no companions, please.

159.A

Not I, nor your henchmen,
Elizabeth

160.

Forget her, guys,
let her fold, hang out to dry
in a perfectly small City.

167.Alt

Transparent amber olive oil in a porcelain dish:
Inside, a thin black streak, coiled.

168.

Out, Catherine.

168.A

Against who, I am forbidden to name.

168.Alt

Who hates her husband more than her parents.

168.B

Mars gone
and the gray cloud cover
Early morning, no sun,
together, over the pillow.

168.C.

]
]
Bruised, treated
without respect
]
]neighborhood
]a brown patch in the crimson bougainvillea.
]

169.

Fallen, unable to part

169.A.

Funeral leftovers

170.

Leda, certainly.

171.
]
Divorce: alimony, booty.

172.

Eleanor

173.

Pure evil

174.

Ecstasy planter

175.

A root that rips up sidewalks

176.

Block-a-dock

177.

Crepuscule

178.

Get going. Your age and wrinkles offer me nothing

179.

Gossamer, underwear

180.

Downtime, empty pocket

181.

Dropper

182.

Cancelled

183.

Refuses to come out

184.

Wing spread, the ascent

185.

Safe passage

186.

187.
Stephanie, again

188.

Tanya, ah, Tanya

189.

Myth breaker

190.

Ambrosia

177.

No skill, an absolute natural

178.
,

179.

Onyx, her breast cups.