I had to water the plant today.

I lay on a chaise and thought.

I went to his bed and lay down.

I heard about his brother’s death.

I carried the pothos to my room.

I allegorized a stream.

It was customary to visit bodies of water.

After solstice, the sun beat down for two or three days at a time.

Then it would fall away in a heavy rain, usually in the afternoon.

The point was to stick your feet in the water, not to be submerged.

Once that happened, you wouldn’t know when you would be able to leave.

There was no mechanism keeping you there except your own desire.

I didn’t understand people who were tempted by streams and sunlight.

I walked off away from the UV radiation. I convened with northern aroids.

I felt scornful like a princess, deviant like a plant, adventurous as a little girl.

The goose held its neck flat against the water, as if it were a gun.

I was mad—I was mad to be under the sun.

Then, I forgot my desire, because I had a stream of my own.

The frat houses lined with epitaphs; the diffracted orange sun either horizontal or erect; the drama of seeing one seeing one; a very slow run, all this could be compressed into several lines. Some one asked me about the epiphanic nature of the poetic image and I was reminded then of what I had forgotten; I had forgotten the naïve value of the poem.

Lacan wrote about the decidua of the womb.

She decided to read the Dobbs Decision.

(I was still getting used to the “she.")

“But every year God smote me.”

Blood is vivid this month.

Nice happy screams outside in the late night.

I killed two pantry moths in coitus.

Hera, will you make me a woman for this?

It was secluded, it was forced by stricture, it went down tight and forceful. It felt private, you were invited in, the water turbid and neither warm nor cold. He took off his clothes and waded in in light blue briefs. I took off my shorts and waded in in black merino. When we had reached a point in the water where the hem of my tank top was starting to get dragged in, I took a look at him, and he looked back, and I said I would enter. It was so loud. When there’s nothing on your skin you don’t feel the boundaries of your naked form. When I dropped into the water I felt a wonderful pressure.

I spat and coughed,

I thought of Dora and her leukorrhea.

I advanced, frog-style, head above the water.

I know nothing about it.

I took it off, and put it on a ledge.

Unlike Diana I did it with awareness.

Did you see my chest? Did it seem odd or natural? Are there other options?

Was I supposed to have yelled I AM FEMALE over the roar of the water?

She stood firm against the current, but she didn’t know her weight.

It was a slow process, not just losing it but finding out that she was about to lose it.

She was fully aware of having guarded herself against the current.

Like Bruno Ganz, the analyst watches her from the sidelines.

Not leeches, but blackfly larva attached themselves to stone.

Why are insects who spend their larval stages in water end up craving blood?

At the limit-point the view was obscured by the shape of the land. I hugged my knees to my chest and shivered, observing the long cut on my left thigh. He pointed out the black larvae on my face and a wound on my back which I could neither see nor feel. I made a joke. The joke was that all the problems of Western philosophy emerged in situations like the one we were in—two guys looking at a landscape and unable to see around the rock, unable to advance. But neither of us were philosophers. He didn’t speak for a while and I was quiet out of wetness and discomfort. I sat in my caged position. He said I looked cold. I couldn’t do what I thought I needed to do.

No proof of anything. It was cute to sit outside of a bucolic burger king.

Feet planted on a rock and being pulled in despite carefulness. Tenderness in being pushed into the water as if by a large and implacable infant. Avaricious currents pulled the glasses from her face, closed eyes under turbid water. The rolling was smooth, so that the body resembled that of a large fish being held and descaled and chopped up in a market, barely escaping the human’s gloved hands. And the cuts were so smooth that they were undetectable for a time. There was an element of katabasis to it, the descent down those roiling waters towards the fall whose drop signified nothing but the most violent of deaths. I liked how dark and shaded this place was, a narrow crack.

I like shivering in front of someone I trust.

Falling had to do with fear and trembling and kid-like fearlessness.

The accomplishment of losing something, including a lack of pictures.

The writer says that when she is done it is because she looks away.

The writer is claiming that after the erection everything is deciduous.

The painter feels he is ejaculating when he finishes a painting.

The problem is a shame with respect to images.

There’s no proof you saw anything, or that anything changed.

I can’t write a description of a scene without losing interest in the scene.

Print-out of a medieval love song on your floor.

The Waves splayed open at the base of your bed.

The salty smell of IKEA fabrics after some time.

Dora and twenty volumes of the OED.

Flesh of my Flesh with some Gerhard Richter.

The catalog is misleading; it implies a desire which faded as soon as I left.

The second time I came I lay in your bed to think about my mute princess.

I don’t know what you think about the notion that you chased me in a dream.

Now I like water and haven’t figured anything out.

Perhaps there’s an agalma waiting somewhere.