He was good with words, words that went straight to the liver. Her ankle burns where he described it. Those were the afternoons. Evenings she took in piecework, the treadle machine with its locomotive whir traveling the lit path of the needle through quicksand taffeta or velvet deep as a forest. The Boast At the dinner table, before the baked eggplant, you tell the story of your friend, Ira, how he kept a three-foot piranha in his basement.
Evening expires in a yawn of stars.
But on the walk home, when he pulls you into the hedges, and the black tongues of leaves flutter, and those boogey-man eyes glitter, there won't be time for coming back with lies, with lies. The fish in the stone would like to fall back into the sea. He is weary of analysis, the small predictable truths. He is weary of waiting in the open, his profile stamped by a white light. Patient, he drifts until the moment comes to cast his skeletal blossom.