“I have beliefs, of course, like everyone—but I don’t always believe in them.” 

I wasn’t born ugly. I’ve seen snapshots of myself as a baby, as a toddler. Beautiful little girl with springy dark curls, shining dark eyes, a happy smile.

It was midsummer, the heat rippling above the macadam roads. Cicadas screaming out of the trees and the sky like pewter, glaring.

The days were the same day, like the shallow mud-brown river moving always in the same direction but so slow you couldn’t see it. 

 

Early Saturday afternoon the man who had introduced himself as Oliver took Ginny to several shops on Madison Avenue above 70th Street to buy her what he called an appropriate outfit. For an hour and forty-five minutes she modelled clothes, watching with critical interest her image in the three-way mirrors, unable to decide if this was one of her really good days or only a mediocre day. 

Hypothesized: X follows me continually, whenever I go out, for one of several reasons that are mutually exclusive. He is on a mission of reclamation, a private detective hired by my father; he is a police agent; he is an acquaintance in disguise or an acquaintance of someone I know/have known, who wants revenge for a real/unreal offense I have committed.

So much depends
upon
forgetting much

The skin is the largest organ in the body. The skin of an average-
sized man has an area of approximately seventeen square feet and
weighs about five pounds. —medical handbook

For what is there to say
that hasn’t been said before with more,
or less, or approximate skill?

Though you learned the dance routines they made you learn
    and you were 1996 Colorado State All-Star Kids Cover Girl

Beyond our seed-littered pond a small forest of bamboo grows wild.
Hear the wind-rustling like shaken paper? Bamboo.

First you run! Fly!
Turn yourself inside out.
Another time you escape.

This is the 5th time for me to be writing to you
& I promise it is the last.
I know your reading this Joyce Carol

Here is the wide veranda striped in sunshine
and here, beside the house, those bushes heavy
with tiny white clustered berries said

You died on Wednesday. On Friday
I’m hauled by limousine to be photographed
for a magazine feature, Charles Street

“I feel like such a… shit.
I rescued this little lost terrier
on Broadway and 90th, mangy little thing

My anger is such that the very ice-fields would melt,
if I had the power.
If I had the power.

It nudges you from your shallow sleep,
it whispers love-mockeries.

I am prowling, my feet are damp.
I am snatching at things to save my life.

After the first death there is a shrinking.

Miracles to fit in a spoon.

The sun rolling crazy and free as the wheel of an old baby buggy.

 

Impossible to stand. Or to sit.
Impossible to sleep.
So I squatted in the cage, my knees trembling.

Of course the face is real
of course it isn’t a private fantasy
we see it as clearly as you do

Where the gale winds blew they crouched low
where too much horizon leered they fashioned a circle
and drew its boundaries tight

“I declined an offer from our friend Lanny Jones, People editor, to write an O.J. essay for them, based upon a few days at the trial.”

“For the widow there is one looming question: Should you outlive your husband?”