if this isnt nice

I’ve hoarded your name in my mouth for months. My throat is a beehive pitched in the river. Look! Look how long this love can hold its breath.

But the wolf is always there, even // when I can’t see it.

I have not broken your heart — you have broken it — and in breaking it, you have broken mine.

1. You must let the pain visit. 2. You must allow it teach you. 3. You must not allow it overstay.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.