AMBIGUITIES

                 "Torture? ---
perhaps you don't have a talent for it,"
the old veteran answered wearily,
looking past her at the Bay,
his free hand shielding the flame of his lighter

To talk of virtue in the abstract
and realize one of us
is posing

Say we recover the radical
innocence of the Sixties
when a single bullet measured our distance
from chaos

Innocence --- do we
step out of this world,
away from  the others'?

And responsibility ---
does it mean preserving our integrity
with the dead
bodies of women and children?

I hear her move
in the next bed
awake now with the light
dawning inside me

The body I want
is stepping out of her clothes and coming toward me ---

I could disappear into that mouth,
those dark eyes that question me

Love,
to be drunk with it
when you don't remember anymore
who you are

A woman's memory is in her shoulders,
that's where it all happens

A man wants to live several times
but he can't
he has only one life and it's short

to go on living ---
each layer, another question,
a mine that darkens as we work
our way deeper