Temper your questions.

Sunny and blustery, New York thrusts forward in earnest. Daffodils and anenomies at the flower stands, papers, old men in trench coats greeting each other warmly. Kyra and I stroll in Central Park, eating hot dogs and catching up since the last candle-lit picnic evenings of the Penniless Decadents. It feels for a moment, as though Paris has been displaced, that we are ambassadors to a funny piece of that city, and we stare through the leafless trees at skyscrapers, uncomprehending. Everyday mysticism, the Catholics of this city bear ashy testament to their fallen God, each forehead smeared with a black cross.

Daniel comes to visit after dinner, he seems to fall up into my arms, hugging me tightly and smelling the same. He has been working construction and confesses that fiberglass chafes him at the hem of his long johns. We laugh in the living room, produces a flask awhile Kyra and I furnish the chocolate. The night ends at One Last Shag down the street, on the back porch; he and Kyra chain smoking. Daniel talks about the horrible falling off of years ago, mine, not his, and I feel conscious of the deep scar that pits my heart. Finger the raw places gently, yes, I remember, this is the exit wound. The old exorcism haunts. I think about his happiness, somewhere, my other, and hope it feels complete, as mine often does now. The sense of being whole; of filling, emptying, and filling.

In the night, I wake with a close feeling in my chest. I'm late, or buried. Too hot. Open the window. Pad barefoot across the creaky floor, turn on the faucet and stare at my shadow in the bathroom mirror. Wash my hands and douse my face in cool water. I return to bed and a slowly recite verses. Measuring Whitman as though a dosage for calm sleep. And his lines dissolve into images: the transparent summer evening,
the blouse, the bosom bone, the tongue, the bare-stripped heart.

The different ways to wear a scar. Art, artifice, Marge Piercey and her dwarfed trees, my teenage companions. The hair in curlers, she said, the crippled brain, the hands you love to touch.