From : THE WHITE FLOWER

White dress. Walking. Quoins tapping. Not as a horse, but still a faint clip clop. Or perhaps yes a horse. Precipitated out of light, the white-winged Phaeton.I can see her, a sigh, crying into the air and lighting the clouds with blushes of pink .

Tired so tired,I saw, remembered,there on the steps, mother with her sleepy eye, pacing the carpet, tortellini on the plates. Oh yes, she died. . . .five years ago. And thene there was silence that has not ever gone. but perhaps hat is the custom, even as in a dream. And though there would be a marriage, what is it without her, The pastel squares of her white print dress: nougat with candied fruit. Rose and lime and orange and lemon peel.

And her always walking. Holding my hand to cross the street, where the fire hydrants were little men, peeing into the sky ... little red cocks jutting from the curb. I saw them everywere, their saintly caps. It was that kind of world and we were crossing, and the tide was of the traffic and she held my hand, pacing me as we cut against the traffic home. Me 'n her. We were alone. The sun shining into the world, golden and rare with yellow and white spirals, like great hoops of fire melting into the ground. Fire of gravity, beauty and despair. And I could hear the world singing in the greenest blade of grass, the song of a quietude that is infused with green, blue and ochre in its melting. And the sun's white shining that chimed in the air, its blue pillars standing against a porch of white paint, so clear and dutiful in its lawful quivering. And ice cream! Ice cream! The coldness melting, mint and chocolate, . . . white so white her dress and skin. As if whiteness could ever be a thing, but had formed itself into her to reach out to me and hold me laughing. I her child and she my promise. I saw here there and knew what it would be, and when the nap came the world grew sleepy and I was tired and diminshed, pale and fatigued. . . a little pink basket of aromatic things. Tides of sleep above them dreaming. So dreaming of sleep I hear the others calling, the high, pure voice and the quiet,low kvetching. A wind of what is lost, with love infused in its paradisal sigh, and cries in the air, and it is the voice of the prophet, her Pythian whisper as she squats above the spring, inhaling the vapors.Listening as she speaks the words a low rumbling in the mouth of death: " To be married is a pretty thing. To be married has a pretty ring. To be married is a parrying. A fling that lasts but not so long. Yes to be merry is a fretful sting. Best you do not take his name. . . ."

But I want to. I do. When you pass out in your sleep you wake up see. The Vril-ya did away with artistic niceties.... I am a tiny little ball of dough against the sea. A little pink wad of beauty and desire. I love him I love him I hope he stays away from me. No, I hope he finds me, here in my little ball of flesh,as a poem needs a plowing that is metrically pleasing , held in the shape of its intensity and squeezed, pressing beauty into the shades of its vent.
As "Timely and beutiful shall the day begin" and " wake to grief to press these flowers." . ."

. . . I have never loved any man who believed in me as a woman... That would mean they were not astute enough to catch me in a lie.. . .How could I respect that, or cling or cleave... As always to be pitied is itself to be scorned But I have found myself in silence that will not remove me... "Oh woman who knows that woman is sorrow."

In short, a man. And yes. I am. But how would he believe, as he has kissed me there, and penetrated with a thick and sighing thing, whose white tears fall as if tears were sighs jutting into a spring of blood and musing. But I was born with this cut, and found myself sighing into the devil's pink with such a depth of sorrow and lust that only he could finger.Though it is true I was not waiting for just any blessed member . . .? The threaded heat and wetted slide. To hump is to be made then. I make him and he makes me. And nothing comes between us coming.The pretty sighs of quiet breathing. And here asleep and listening I hear a new voice and it comes to me quietly, and I hear it whispering into the light and it is me waking and it is also not me:

:
**

"Then rest in silence. Your shape unshaping and shaping the word. Do you remember the day you first saw the sun? it was the day in which the world became your fever... I will tell you of your life, and in the hearing you may release yourself from this dream of dependancy, which for you like few others, is merely a squeamishness about what there is to lose. Rest then, sleep. And remember there is a world. . .

"There once was a girl named Lucy Bright. And she was tiny and pink and soft n' clean. And in her slumbered a reason that was a dream. And she grew into her little allowance of skin, and those who saw her loved her, and those who didn't, wished. And she grew and grew and was an effort inside the air. And her father was a chuckle and her mother a flare. Laughter came to her as little birds did, and she saw what was true and in so seeing, the great bulk of the world remained unknown to her, and appeared as it were, as a singular x ray, a darkling darkness, that was behind the day.

And she did not know she was pretty, but was told from the beginning that her form was pleasing, and she asked, or as it were formed a question with regard to what is her. And that question became her, as she was taut and diverse, diffuse and lean. And turned from the dark to the light's sybilline whisper, and heard it and heard again and there was much to hear, like cymbals clashing. And she knew then that she was what she was: a person, not a thing. Not a chasm or a gap, though she had those in her. Not a shadow or a tremble though she knew those too. . but understood herself to be was to be a very pretty thing, and the very present figure that would help Steven Flowers to stagger through the drunken door, as he was, on occasion, a bit of a lush, neither kind nor mean, but of himself a person of another flavor. And it was himself, that flavor, that winsome particularity, that she, many nights, did turn as many times as she could get him up.
And the voice she heard even as she slept? Was it a figure of her own narcissim, or a single hum, twined out of a million angelic authorities, she knew she must assimilate,in order to see what was beneath her skin, that smooth creamy acre of her desire for him.. . .