with apologies to Wallace Stevens "Could you live like that," she asked me, "moving from incandescence to incandescence," the moon, the orchard of plum trees like snow in early spring? Become two pale candles melting in their own wax pooled at their feet, or Kabuki dancers robed in silk, twirling to the silver notes of the flute? Or a wood thrush, whose song on a green afternoon takes me to ferny places where shadows gather, cool and dark. Summer nights, freckled with stars. Hot sand beaches, red peppers, smooth smiles of sliced avocados, salsa of reggae, steel drums, palm trees shaking their hips in the wind. I guess that I could never live either here, or there. That the heart is a wanderer, that restlessness flows and ebbs like the tide. That the book of sunlight has yet to be written. That all of the petals will fall to the ground.