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Jennifer Love Hewitt's tits are spilling over (again)

: desire

black umbrellas are open wide

tourists are carrying their Macy's bags

I am remembering Nantucket

A man is stopped to look into a window

where there is a clothed mannequin man seated

watching a naked mannequin woman

her dress pooled around her fine plastic ankles

It's an ad about an ad man

looking in at a plastic couple

: desire

In Nantucket, ice clung to sea like a dry lip stuck to

Fran Drescher is Happily Divorced

: hope

In Nantucket, we were the most grown we'd ever been

we didn't fight

not once

They said...you didn't finish high school, you're not going ANYWHERE

: fear

Still, in Nantucket we learned to make coffee from a single cup brewing system

individual plastic containers (what waste)

I said...I'm going to finish college, I'm going SOMEWHERE

: hope

In Nantucket, we learned

Don't let impotence ruin your sex life

: hope

Improve bad credit

: hope

The wind in Nantucket shook the whole of the house

Inside was

: desire

You wouldn't go to the top of that house (for the wind)

even though from above one could see the whole of the sea

It's ok

From below I know

in Nantucket

you tended our fire

: hope

Out back you were nothing but a dark corner of yard beneath a 90-degree angle of stiff bush. Behind the bush was a chain link fence separating our plot from the neighbors' whom I never knew.

You were dark moist cool-to-the-touch packed earth, a dip of ground. Inside the mouth of you were bricks thrown in like teeth, orthodontia Dad had given you.

I remember, more than once, standing inside the old house at the kitchen window, watching the dog dig into your packed hole. The bricks were to keep her in so she couldn't dig deep enough to crawl under chain link.

The dog's nails, ground to the quick for her digging, for her digging, more than once, more than five times, a dozen, a double-dozen, her digging against your teeth ground her nails to the quick, tiny blood marks dotting peach-colored living room pile, points on a map that led nowhere.

Both my sisters lived under ground in that house. Each had carpeted stairs that led to basement windows that had plastic bubble covering. Both put framed pictures and piled-up clothes on their stairs, obstructions that, in the event of fire, could keep them from escaping. Or so I worried.

It's been 26 years now since I stood in the house looking in your direction, longing to be as brave as the dog that has long since died. And yet there are holes like you everywhere in my life, still. Steel wool in crevices, t-shirts in cracks, wood puddings to patch slats.

Last night I ate dinner with a new friend. I told her I'd been living in my apartment for eight years now. I called myself a gorilla in a cage. I meant that somehow over time I've felt my own species leave me. Still I live inside walls, escape hatches plugged with my own psychic obstruction.

How tricky the breakup stage. Rather like the getting-together stage, where each tries to anticipate the undisclosed feelings of the other. I create the voices myself. Tonight I walked through the door, saying, Hi Digg! How was your day? There's food for you on the stove. I talked in the same baby voice inside the empty room from which the original had once come, a room once occupied by a man with maps. How interior our thoughts now. How many fir long hours./How that split wood/warmed us. How continuous./Red house. Green tree I miss. How interior our thoughts, then. Each day I wake/I woke to remember that I alone/lone in this house. Insert here a Rilke quotation, something to get that old hope going. Only, no. How continuous do we die to come down/as rain; that land's refrain/no we never go there anymore.