I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven across the plains' enormous spaces around you. I know you are reading this poem in a room where too much has happened for you to bear where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed and the open valise speaks of flight but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem as the underground train loses momentum and before running up the stairs toward a new kind of love your life has never allowed. I know you are reading this poem by the light of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide while you wait for the newscast from the intifada. I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers. I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out, count themselves out, at too early an age. I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious. I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand because life is short and you too are thirsty. I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language guessing at some words while others keep you reading and I want to know which words they are. I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse. I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming. Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other, you've been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed: our friend the poet comes into my room where I've been writing for days, drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere, and I want to show her one poem which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate, and wake. You've kissed my hair to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem, I say, a poem I wanted to show someone... and I laugh and fall dreaming again of the desire to show you to every one I love, to move openly together in the pull of gravity, which is not simple, which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

I held her hand to the sun, imagine how the light spills around a rose when you are looking at it from underneath, that was her hand, her blood showing through her translucent skin, rose red red rose.

She wanted to know a lot of things, for one if I was the one for her, she thought too much and understood too little. So we got along just fine as I knew little and understood how much she hungered to know.

I began to tell her easy consoling lies, truth is always bitter, for example she sometimes said to me, "You are such a loser", ofcourse silently. Such easy servings and so much bitter taste that she sought to dispel when her tounge snaked over mine.

We sucked on each other, each becoming the other's oxygen cylinder, we sucked till our seams unravelled and we burst into flames, we were two zepplins floating in air and burning, I roved my tongue over her deep Martian peaks and valleys, we were so casual with inflammables for we didn't know what burning was then. She would casually straddle me, take me in and say, "Now make me a mother. Help me make a few babies."

So it's only now that I understand, when I awake in my dreams by a vision of lines wriggling, shifting and dying on my plams that it simply marks a hailstorm of babies, all stillborn and all dead.