How she loved that passage, even though one of “them”
had written it. But James was different: He could see
how women think—and how most men aren’t able to.

I got the call at 4 a.m. David said that he’d been up
since three. “It’s bad, man,” he told me on the phone.
“Just talked to the Head Guy. They’ve botched surrealism,

Kenneth noticed a man staring at breasts,
the way he, Kenneth, might look at an ass.
Kenneth felt a solidarity of need.

The French can lie, and yet again can lie;
they lie standing or sitting, if so required.

Why are they looking at me with such hate?
Why can’t I just remember what I said?

I love how love enables all those good-
not-great minds to decide we don’t get it.

We offer each other a dark
brew. But we must drink.
A seduction is the setting up

A man makes a film. 
He is a Jew, a midwestern
Jew, from Cincinnati.

  He remembered how she’d fling her hair. And the moon …

I arrive gasping, my head on your thigh
the head of a drowning man, a shipwrecked man

So bondage is a big part of it, after all—
that old art of rendering a lover submissive:
a tactic, a strategy. Denying somebody’s body

What follows me has found me,
here, in my own house.

 

They rise up so beautifully some nights,
opening like a bright fan of pain—
and what is left of her voice is a darkness

You will come out of me, you know, then.
The years of hovering around you, I hope
benignly, afraid that you will learn my fear,