Ditch work, come home early,

                                      and bring cheese wrapped in paper from the Italian deli.

         Follow me to the kitchen.

                                    I'll start bread with dill and let it rise on the stoop.

            Follow me to bed.  Throw your clothes where you will.

Be my dangerously sentimental lover, lover-girl; my cache of lost art.

            I know it's a hoax.

The smells of cheese and wine and peppercorn salami

                                                                                    don't mean a thing.

            I'm unerringly realistic in my requests: mid-afternoon sex,

sleep through dinner, espresso at nine.

                        One life is not enough to ripen

            and grow distant and kind.  Wild mallow outside the door, its

fine-haired stems; savage lamps, watch them swell.