“Perhaps my trip won’t be so long.”

“Let’s come back to the old wreck.”

“Will you dive?”

“I tried...”

We whispered and saw the dawn, a dawn that had streamers of rain splotch­ing the horizon, pelicans one after the other in long files, our island in the offing, quite black.

P

I was sleepless most of the night, getting out of bed, restless because of the warmth, standing by my window, waiting for a breeze, the stars out, Mercury but no moon, the stars and the crickets and a nightingale and the sea, and someone, somewhere in the house, moving, then silence. I was thinking of him, wanting him, and I began a poem, changed it, rephrased it, thinking, my body needing his body:

Slick with slime to satiety he shoots forward

playing such music upon those strings,

wearing a phallus of leather,