When he takes out a crumpled jacket And shakes the dust off its back by trashing it against a wall, he hears The sound of it, the mountain river By whose shore he had picked up Three pebbles of rounded shale.

Two he gave to Adrienne for safe Keeping - his stone burnt, hers' snow. The third remained here forgotten, Indeterminate in color, like the love child They planned to have but now will not.

Rain on the face, muddy water over the feet Sunflowers embroidered on that girl's shirt And few words of song on the lips

For some reason the mouth only remembers these words as it does other beginnings, such as Adrienne's first kiss - Was it in an elevator or a subway station?

Laughter out of bars, face growing old Even as it stares at itself in plate glass. Voice grown rusty with silence says "voice"

Did it know as a happy infant with bright Eyes that there will be a time when it will Be confessing "you are my heart" to Adrienne With her skeptical measuring gaze?

Hand in the raincoat pocket entering A warm envelope of paper, a book Of poems read once for hope

Why speak of it, the cursed word, bitter Bitter as the Witches Brew drunk once on All Hallows Eve. Adrienne was there too, Wearing a mask over her smiling face.

Water, with a little added salt, fills and fills The ditch that is the idiot heart, always Trick and treating for love and its observances.

"When one has lived a long time afar from the love of others, as in this universe of dying stars in which no light travels between bodies, and the constant vacuum of self seals in, more or less, the instinct for giving, small acts of kindness by near strangers are as wounding as rain in a desert."