Where Kiki Met Him at the Los Angeles Airport

Mainly in the tunnel between terminal and gate, a tiled tube of light sunk under this taxiway or the next. First the children running through strangers to bury their heads in his greatcoat, their grandmother finally catching up, the two of them kissing.

Maybe they'd all take the back way home through Inglewood and Westchester, past homes the two owned once, the dramas all past climax, unraveled even in memory. More than once the carload took the long way back, through Hollywood to the turnaround point at C.C. Brown's, all the hot fudge anyone wanted.

Any of those nights coming down out of the sky, beyond the Teamster bosses in DC, beyond striking drivers in Albuquerque, did the old man ever wonder what it meant to fall back into all those arms in that bright space under the ground? Or did he just fall into them, a failure half the time on the surface? Without knowing why, they knew a touch could heal, whatever ached them died for a while in the hugs, the kisses, in climbing the stairs to ground level, where the night, rich and lethal, would have to wait.

Theories of the Novel

On the water, in the tiny boat hired for next to nothing,
Chloe Rook read her lover’s palm. A sparrow signed the sky.

Only three days since the swordfish dinner, the wine,
yet candlelight resembled the last heartbeats of the blind.

The turn in the county road. The condo with its three
tin-colored keys. A chair facing the sun. Oranges in a bowl.

The lineman suicidal. The plumber wearing down her knees.
More heartache than we need, really, all around like bad lovers.

No one cared about Leticia’s sick little boy. No one cared about
Matty Cruz’s failing bistro in the failing core of Old Town.

The man we knew to be the secret lover all along
snapped a ski, veering left over an ice edge to his death.

We were left with ourselves, then the writer introduced himself.
He took off his jacket and, too late, tried to seduce us.

Pinch Me, I'm Dreaming