from an email to someone who wouldn't appreciate it

     I just had this strange revelatory moment. I guess it was a little longer than a moment, but it was so nice. I went down and got my laundry from the dryer, and it included my comforter, and I was waiting for the elevator and dancing around a little bit with the comforter, as I am likely to do if I am alone in a lobby at 3am. And then the elevator landed and in the silence it suddenly seemed so strange, and I thought of how different it would be if my building were in New York, and I thought of all the lobbies I've been in and waited in and danced in through my whole life. . . and everything was absolutely that wet kind of quiet, and there was a sort of faint rosy-musk NY taxi scent in there. And then I just sat down in the lobby for a while and rested my chin on my comforter and noticed it. It reminded me of all the sorts of places I used to have to go to be alone before I had someplace of my own. It even had the same sort of damp-library temperature. I really liked it. It was nice to sit there. It was calm and cooling, like resting your face against marble.

red

the taste
of laying flat my tongue
on moist brown bark
on stone with blood to be drawn

wings arrange a drapery of fluttering above
in the cathedral ceiling of palate

like latin phrases dripping translation
slowly down
like earth at the top of my swallow

an old tale well-retold
from handworn leather binding
my lips humming with the shimmer
of its glass-slipper shell