I ready my bandy bike for a thrust west, the sad me holding tight to the tentative other me and the whole hoping that silence can be trusted. Glows and gleams relamp, chordal voixes knotting, love at long endless last
aum shri matre namaa
girija shankara
aum namaa shivaya
shiva aum namaa

Even an island ringed with windswept blue
even my lonely body in heartbreaking Casceaux
even this lilacking season

Hard times in P-town. Feeling thin, flimsy, dragging. A shift today with afternoon two-and-a-half glasses of graduation champagne, a giggling fit. Circumscribedly thankful to alcohol for changing my brain patterns.

Today the storms and the sun-dazzles mixed, the Black Swallowtails and the Jersey bulls. A massive gift: brief intimacy with one tiny Spring Azure, form marginata. My living decade dies, and somehow I survive it. My ex-lover is very good to me. Lenya Gurevich is very good to me; except that I might have rather had just that one picture alone, the fourth one down, you and me so vividly full of those times. And sad to see no Sarah and know why. Thank you, Lenya; thank you all beautiful women of my life, all beautiful men, butterflies, bulls even. Today Pete Higgins said to me in his spluttery Penobscot-county accent, "I thought I saw a long drinka skim milk out there in the field, I wondered if it was you!" So many hopes inflate my lanky body at this springtiming year's end; but I distrust them like the bemasked fears I know them to be. I trust love. And New England apple-blossom time, ecology of my birth.

Bessarabia, how you weary me! Your rose-petals steeped or candied, your precious little cakes, the interminable Turkic murmur of your samovars. Gypsies, Slavs, Roumanians, Greeks, who can call this a country? Rye grows all over by its own logic; it ergotizes, sours. Bábushki gather dry brush for bake-fires. Butterflies on petals and on pins. Hellenized boyars, The Φιλική Έταιρεία in Chişinău, Tsarist/Soviet annexation. River-borders. Disinheritance.

Black ledge gurgles and swims in a swollen tide, the place's massy present pressing itself into me like how a fine-wale corduroy slipcover might into the slack, sleeping cheek of my beloved. For whom I ache, indelibly.

Trees give leaf, dirt-plots bloom; my grief runs like sap through bast, massing strength in this plant-body to which I potently, pregnantly inhere. I find I can do many things easily, but what I most want to do I cannot do alone.