I	She collects alphabets.
	("I want his mouth on me.")

 
	"a is for Alias, Alibi," he spoke.
(He opens the door for old women, has his way with Distance.) It begins with the speaking of it. And around. The separate cities we are. Forlorn the fruit. To confront the lips mouth promise to free us. (She watches his hands, almost nervous. And certain.) To make contact.
	She makes him a detective: to determine where her beauty opens as it takes over the room. When he tries a line on her (this is his Test) she replies that there are things she too brings with her wherever she goes to remember who she is. Her impatience, like an instruction, will permit him to Begin. Rude, private, her strange beauty. (She will wait). As the days come together & together; where the want is we are not absolute. In the Beginning: small talk (words unimportant); an offer of fruit. The pale mouth full & wide with pear; & albeit, also some lesser things.
	She wants something exotic and fine. Worn through at the knees. (She is an orchard.) Then she looks at him with the freedom of apples. (Forgets about sutures and falling for the time being. A certain nervousness.) Until he finally forgets what he was saying anyways . . . 
	"Towards ourselves, . . . the pleasing. Distract me." (Later he will fall to sleep surrounded by her scent. Will smile to himself, pleased his mother would not like her.) The wild berries of her ache sky blue. She waits. For the unspoken promise:
	to be gentle with what is known of another. To trust the fabulist. Tell her: she would give her petticoats for the moonshine, her hair for the longing. (Delirium, not a foreign thing.) If she could give her waist of dahlias & drawstrings, all q and g, o the trustfulness of spines, speak the words "his" & "skin" – (o city of her & weathervanes!) (She likes to linger.)
	– she would.

 
 
 
II	 She is an orchard.

 
At the base of her spine is where the pear begins, outdoes itself. Under a sky like this she is capable of Anything.
	"I will see you no more than Six Times . . ." she whispers to his lobe tighter between her teeth when he laughs. He pictures her as a child, awkward child, spoiled wild with neglect.
	He gathers up all the things he knows, lays them out across his body, a series of books (The Book of Bone, The Book of Endings) hoping this is enough for her. And she knows this.
	When o the hot. The when o arresting. O plump of mouth & lips, manifest with orchids, insistent, plums hover to roundness. A thing of loneliness, something in exile. ("But why all her damned questions?" he thinks, simultaneously feigning ignorance and proud to know he must be earned.)
	". . . all the fragile things held together finely, anarchic," she would say,
	". . . a peel." To solve crime with the undeath continent of kiss: possibility of lips & lips to make her moan. How the word moves in-tricate, anonymous, through the want. ("Just don't let her ask about that . . .")
	"When I place this here in the room, when I touch you like this, it means."
	(When they finally get him drunk enough, he will swear he saw A Wing, hers, at this moment. And did not wash his hands for days.) Maroon, the sweet ache into violet where peculiar fruits purr.

 
 
 
III	  To find herself forgetting things, sleeps uneasily.

 
	The fruit in the cloth dress, the fig, the velvet fruit & cream: Take it. The isolation like trembling teach it to hold to the tree.
	". . . love me where the hurt is" and then to add
	". . . because this night is fastened with such tampered with beauty, sometimes we see blood among things."
	Then the cigarette, the steeples. And chocolate. (He points to where the distance is gone to, looks out the window. His speechlessness hits. The corners of her mouth.)
	There are cruel aspirations somebody gave him. And he wants to give them back. "Split me open into rapture intimate. Closeness like pleasure. And its terror so that the seeds can find me." (But she has put her mark on him as with certain forms of control. En-velopes go unopened. He is ecstatic, weary. Symptomatic. Gambles all night. Bets only on Number Seven. Number Seven. Over and over.) She tells him about the man with a rosary for a mouth who once said best of all she likes ideas growing large in the hand. As she'd whisper, hot mouth wet on ear, dirty words become starlings. His heartbeat is a clock, her mouth an unfed animal. (She hates that when he leaves the sweetening sheets in the morning, swaggers down the path in the way that he does, he walks away also, with her Secret.)
	What the fruit demands: to be in the world. Fleshly and appled: fantastic. ("Promise to repeat to me whatever I scream out in my sleep. Promise!") There is a private language of honey, ancient, de-tailed & her hands upon him an intelligence. She comes up against the wasted diagram of his hair, holds to it like sensation. To together, machine.
	"Look, the fruit . . . unspoken, its logic."
	"I open myself up for you where we become this exquisite loneliness . . ." This is the instant of his mouth.