For Rachel In London, For Her Weeks in Hell

A night of sleeplessness, and little to show for it
            except the molten sunrise with cold air and three paragraphs on Eros.

Writing to realize
            patterns in Greek: so that being touched by you I may…; whomever Eros touches…

(One thousand lines between.)
            I recorded my thoughts in a letter: I am drunk.

We were on the farm and I had never seen
            the sunrise: fluidity in ancient breathings (rough or smooth).

Cathexis: from the Greek word for retention,
            a psychological term salient here as a description of what has changed.

Let me write clearly—harrowed eyelids—it was
            a night like lacewings.

Somewhere peripheral: absences left by a lover, the hope of seeing an old friend,
             one who is far from here and far from London, far from Plato’s Symposium.

(Rachel, come visit, it is cold here, and far too late in the night.)

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