Mature at Ends

My mind needs the balance of demands, he told her, not knowing which way to agree with. So what does it mean
to be free to intend?

Already having been his example for twenty years, it was easy enough to swim around in. A
ghost-ladder of explanation swallowing an answer. To be the literal playground of a choice.
A limit.

Inside of which the antecedent chain of internalized shadows, ancestral as inhalation inside a sneeze, corral, no
horse, stasis overdose of running minus legs, has a field day containing fulfillment. Both of them were more than they
could handle, but in excess of what they could contain. And this, for lack of a convention more original,
they called love.

Which passing mirrors would echo as dependence. Because it feels like this, so often. With less time to
myself, but fiercely, involuntarily focused, what's left to think about itself, around its often problems, has a
concentrated richness. Where he stops, sated in arrival; departure point where she accepts him.

But I'm not that, I'm the man you are. Feeling like yourself when you're living for me. Not to say I'm some
feminine mist. Walk in, get lost, find yourself. And in the ambience I can't help but provide, since I'm it,
landscapes forever retracting into the helpful, like glory rolling around in the inexperienced, concentrate
on exact details on how life
is bereft.

By the time I'd graduated the fourth grade, and didn't even know it, my sense of constant acceptance
was almost limitless. She said. And so was a return message, with double measure.

So you need it too? And even longer, it sounds like, than it needs you? The turn darkening the length
was surprising him.

Of course. Not a day doesn't pull me through that I don't wonder why I am so definitely inside it. The kids,
their father, the country, its opposite, the people, their abstract collective involved in literal and responsive
war. Every time a cup meets my reach, out of the cupboard, I'm both less and more than its
author--but never exactly the precisely.

The more I think back, she said, hearing his pressure, from the beyond of myself, the less
I can demand it.

A Lady To Coast A Random Sense of Wonder

She was wearing her American Flag silk dress. On the boardwalk the evening tourist crowd could almost
get lost in the interference she was running. It was twilight. Folks were letting their real hunches and
desires out, to hover a half inch over the delicate hair-haze of their forearm skin; her chestnut double
ponytail brought their own dividedness to light. Where the retina and the genital could meet, and agree--what she
was taking for a walk that evening was everywhere.

Like midges in the head, no one overlooking Bar Harbor could have guessed, she was mixing facts about
that bay with them. Acadia Park founded in such-and-such year, the outlying islands, what they're known
by, chief products brought to arrive and disappear. Just a week ago she'd ejected smoking from her habits.
So there was her first secret: on her left buttock, as a joke, or as a promise for an installment plan, she'd
let her new husband, her new young husband, plant it like a pun, butt of, punchline, right there. Where
only he could close his eyes and think.

In the colonial-style house at the top of the cliff-face, he was there. She couldn't do the same and that
was natural. To imagine him in the foyer asking the hostess how long the wait would be, it would take
open eyes and a modest ambition of looking there. As the porch reverses its angles to shivery kicks of
light. Candles on tables set for couples. In his absence and in honor of his fifteen minutes away from her
she made the gas station hipflask appear and, after ditching a sip, welcome the purse again.

The lesser modes of endearment
are also higher blows of discernment.

Now what does that mean? It means her legs, golden brown, are not examples of summer; but summer an
expanding hem. Like breeze she can feel so much of, it brings from
far-off locales smoothness
from having shaved in the motel that morning. Eagle Lake, California; Jacksonville, Florida; pinpoints
of absorption from wherever these glances and, in the intrusive, longer rough stares she makes returns to the
real a shared nuance. Tonight how many will host a cameo of her goldflake sandals? How many will explain their
withheld directness up her full and, as her husband says, happy thighs, to the destination point where their hands
are waiting? The harbor-clinks and water-slaps on docked hulls sound almost just like them.

She's watching a boy now. Maybe five, taking him in as if her name were Belinda. When mom stoops to
lift his hand off the ice-cream freezer's edge she'll look with the resonance of a Kristin. Babies. Before
or during or after, takes two vaguenesses to phrase them. And then they hit the blastbright open action
and hover out of instinct to crawl. And then, if thirty years are lucky enough they'll get the
pleasure of being
a lightly tanned blonde prizing guests to notice with intelligence. A paradise waiting for her
beau by the wall.