The post boat was like a gondola that called at each houseboat. It carried a clerk, weighing scales, and a bell to announce arrivals.

Has he been kept from us? Portents of rain, rumors, ambushed letters . . . Curtained palanquin, fetch our word, bring us word: Who has died? Who'll live? Has the order gone out to close the waterways... the one open road?

And then we saw the boat being rowed through the fog of death, the sentence passed on our city. It came close to reveal smudged black-ink letters which the postmanhe was alive gave us, like signs, without a word,

and we took them, without a word. From our deck we'd seen the hill road bringing a jade rain, near-olive, down from the temple, some penitent's cymbaled prayer? He took our letters, and held them, like a lover, close

to his heart. And the rain drew close. Was there, we asked, a new password blood, blood shaken into letters, cruel primitive script that would erode our saffron link to the past? Tense with autumn, the leaves, drenched olive,

fell on graveyards, crying "O live!'' What future would the rain disclose? O Rain, abandon all pretense, now drown the world, give us your word, ring, sweet assassin of the road, the temple bell! For if letters

come, I will answer those letters and my year will be tense, alive with love! The temple receives the road: there, the rain has come to a close. Here the waters rise; our each word in the fog awaits a sentence:

His hand on the scales, he gives his word: Our letters will be rowed through olive canals, tense waters no one can close.

It was a year of brilliant water in Pennsylvania that final summer seven years ago, the sun's quick reprints in my attache case: those students of mist have drenched me with dew, I'm driving away from that widow's house, my eyes open to a dream of drowning. But even when I pass --in Ohio-- the one exit to Calcutta, I don't know I've begun mapping America, the city limits of Evanescence now everywhere. It was a year of brilliant water, Phil, such a cadence of dead seas at each turn: so much refused to breathe in those painted reflections, trapped there in ripples of hills: a woman climbed the steps to Acoma, vanished into the sky. In the ghost towns of Arizona, there were charcoal tribes with desert voices, among their faces always the last speaker of a language. And there was always thirst: a train taking me from Bisbee, that copper landscape with bones, into a twilight with no water. Phil, I never told you where I'd been these years, swearing fidelity to anyone. Now there's only regret: I didn't send you my routes of Evanescence. You never wrote.

I want to reach over and move you so your smoky odor of crushed grape cannot drift around me, but I cannot stop watching the smear of candlelight reflected on your ruby belly, bright as the hourglass marking the black widow I killed in my toolshed this summer. Once I loved your mystery uncoiling on my tongue, the dark and gleaming veins you opened there. And I loved your earthy cousin, beer, the one who bears the brassy accent of wheatfields, and your sullen friends bourbon, scotch, and rum who might end the party singing sad Irish songs or smashing furniture and beating the host. But what I loved, finally, was the blackness you brought, the stars dying one by one. I kissed you good-bye long ago. Still, when I see mouths purse with meeting you, see the dim coal of an eye suddenly waken, I recall your first kindlings, blood-glow I could believe for the length of your burning