... as
I slept the sleep of sickness-flight:
she got wounded by Mr. Jones,
braced her unearthed fragility,
desired and received re-past
from revisionist relativity, Rudyard, and Charles Darwin,
only to be tossed over
by our flawed-god fathers --
or so she told me
as she threw herself on my dreaming,
her tears more than her softness waking me
my eyes all divine bliss of conscious sleep and thoughtful instinct,
and I told her they were just poems, their tapped sources just life,
horrifyingly beautiful and preciously sad,
hatefully abetted and wonderfully contrary,
its complexity
always simple,
and she turned my face toward hers,
to our bathing through windows wide in late afternoon California sun,
her eyes all flaming and furious with flaring
devotion too bright to be anything but poetic, and,
with cadence too perfectly imperfect for the stage,
too honest and raw and true for books,
she did not speak but became these words (and they her):
"I will kill the person who won't publish these!
I will kill that publisher!"
-- and,
giving the only sane response to such terribly pleasant madness,
I laughed:
joyously,
maniacally,
easily,
painfully,
simply
laughed.

[end page 94]