Oh, when you get down to the licklog, just to be a good friend. To be consequent to those around me. I guess I can’t see any virtue higher than that.

Within ten minutes of meeting, we’d exchanged love letters from the corners of our eyes.

There’s an old blues refrain: I begged for water, you gave me gasoline.

In mauve sea-orchids as in her striking earlier book Guardians of the Secret, Lila Zemborain brings into relationship the viscera of the body and the spill of the universe in tense compositions that blur distinctions between lyric and prose poetry, between science and eros.

You findyourself in anotherworld you weren’tlooking for wherewhat you see is thatyou have always beenthe wolvesat the door. Leftajar, gaping, your owndoor.

The break-harddetermination tobe a good person,what happened to that? Howis it trueI have togo now? She's lostmy name, but theoccasion of mypresence begsmore. Who is mymother now I amunspoken for?

At which point I grew old and it was like ripping open the beehive with my hands again.At which point I conceived a realm more real than life.At which point there was at least some possibility.Some possibility, in which I didn’t believe, of being with her once more.

At which point my grief-sounds ricocheted outside of language.Something like a drifting swarm of bees.At which point in the tetric silence that followedI was swarmed by those bees and lost consciousness.At which point there was no way out for me either.

And then smelling it,feeling it beforethe sound even reacheshim, he kneels atcliff’s edge and for thefirst time, turns hishead toward the nowvisible falls thatgush over a quarter-mile of uplifted sheet-granite across the valleyand he pauses,lowering his eyesfor a moment, unableto withstand thetranquility—vast, unencumbered,terrifying, and primal.

I have lost the consolation of faith/ though not the ambition to worship