In retrospect it was romantic to be the lonely American recovering from 
        pneumonia, living in a hotel room with a typewriter
        and a sink in a Left Bank hotel in a gray Paris winter.

Just as God is not my sorrow,
neither does this prow
above our gable where a love

Which we will never stop reading
Which is inked in no-color and dust

And where begins our not-quite-romance? An ill summer
passed without the hummed comfort of air-conditioning.
Heat scumbled into the corners of Cambridge: ivory our suburb

I name you Miranda for the wonder
of striped wings, nighthawks that until today
I had not seen hunting since the first year

The beautiful and true
spreading of blood in water,
strands of it waving, surreally outward, 

Little caskets of my former dreams,
I feed you back into the Ganges
of living perceptions, extravagant

While sitting prostrate before the ivory feet of the great Buddha, I spilled almost an entire can of Diet Coke on the floor. I quickly tried to mop up the mess with my long hair. 

At the Hotel Oblivion, Airport Drive
  Mezzanine, Conference Center B

your lionskin
overcoat