“What will you do now with the gift of your left life?”

“I like pouring your tea, liftingthe heavy pot, and tipping it up,so the fragrant liquid streams in your china cup.Or when you’re away, or at work,I like to think of your cupped hands as you sip,as you sip, of the faint half-smile of your lips.I like the questions – sugar? – milk? –and the answers I don’t know by heart, yet,for I see your soul in your eyes, and I forget.Jasmine, Gunpowder, Assam, Earl Grey, Ceylon,I love tea’s names. Which tea would you like? I saybut it’s any tea for you, please, any time of day,as the women harvest the slopesfor the sweetest leaves, on Mount Wu-Yi,and I am your lover, smitten, straining your tea.- Tea”

“You have me like a drawing, erased, coloured in, untitled, signed by your tongue.”

“Better off dead than giving in; not taking what you want.”

“No jewel hold a candle to the cuckoo spit hung from the blade of grass at your ear. No chandelier see you better lit than here.”

“The bed we loved in was a spinning world of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seaswhere we would dive for pearls. My lover’s wordswere shooting stars which fell to earth as kisseson these lips; my body now a softer rhymeto his, now echo, assonance; his toucha verb dancing in the centre of a noun.Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the beda page beneath his writer’s hands. Romanceand drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -I hold him in the casket of my widow’s headas he held me upon that next best bed.- Anne Hathaway”

“Went to the Zoo, I said to Him- Something about that chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.”