Spring, 1994

             New York City 

             Dear Jonathan,

             For one moment in New York, I was alert, fogging up the windows of
             my eyes with misty disbelief. The two of them talked like
             subterranean schoolgirls being watched. They were standing with
             dancers' feet on the dirty concrete. Two plants with buds and no
             roots.

             I wanted to run toward their precipice and belly flop, damnation dive
             into the nevergreen, drink all the poison and dream blue hallelujahs
             while the table cloth was being laid open and spread for me. Make
             language, soul, sword, flutter, shrill-caper, smile, save someone,
             especially us, from dying. Have a great dark secret to carry like a
             ticking shoe box.

             There was never a question about which one would lead me into
             temptation. But my angel threw a noose around my shadow while I
             circled the block in first flight. He pulled the string of some talking
             puppet and by the time the words peppered away into the gilded street
             lamps made merciful by the dim Manhattan moon, the gifted ones had
             descended down the subway stairs, down below the surface of things,
             ushered down forever into the railed womb of the city by my
             heaven-sent one.

             And now exhausted by the leftover forbidden fruit which was whisked
             beneath the valley of the shadow of my pulsing, I go to my room
             hardly awake, beached, lying in the desert bed amongst the Georgia
             O'Keefe driftwood of Chelsea number 912.

             It was June before I needed blue.

             Write soon,

             Mr. Premonition