"The Whip."
I spent a night turning in bed.
My love was a feather, a flat, sleeping thing.
She was very white and quiet.
And above us on the roof, there was
another woman I also loved, had addressed myself to in a fit.
She returned.
That encompasses it.
But now I was lonely.
I yelled, but what is that?
Ugh, she said beside me.
She put her hand on my back, for which act I think to say this,
wrongly."
Because one of the things I do most
fear in writing is the issue of habit,
or what happens when a sense of form or sense of possibility
becomes too known, so that all one does
is simply a repetition of what one knows how to do.
I think in this middle section, I began to see--
not simply, I hope, to play tricks,
but to see what different kinds of line, for example,
how they would affect the possibilities of what could be
said.
This particular one I chose, I think,
because it has a long line, in contrast to these others,
where the line is so markedly short.