Born breathing, soon forgetting just how it's done. Relearning leads to the heart.

Consider the lilies of the field: I learn to love by watching dandelions practice nyctinasty. As soon as its breaths stop my body will rot as readily as a taro corm.

The big machine exhales noisily, sweet-smellingly, more hugely than any lung ever could, and begins to glide off. By the time the last car clacks itself across the seam in the steel there where the rails curve to leave town, I've reached her house and am working to get my breath back.

A grotesque at thirty-one.

If the tissue of a paragraph be inflated or engorged like pulmonary or clitoral tissue, is it abler then to hold these half-formed passing things, eye-spots, memories kept in friends' heads, flakes of light? Inflected with separateness, putting up the prose-system anchor it rode, does it signify more potently now or does its new heft sink it?

My window was everything; four hours between me and my lover's arms. Window-pillow, window-mind, window-heart. Window-eye: bare and hatted heads pass across it like prayer-beads as the train begins to move quietly down the platform. Head, head, head, bead, prayer for openness, prayer for hugeness, prayer for nothingness. Big early-green spaces open up beyond the town's limit, invisible leagues of track pull me on through the morning's tenses.