Staying with friends I felt embarrassed by my love for them, as if it were a wound that might bleed onto their pale, hand-knotted carpets. Back home I filled my kitchen with the first daffodils that had been lured by the sky's fetish-blue into blooming, then nearly ruined by the late snow that pressed into the windows as if asking to be let inside. I need the sound of fire as much as I need its warmth. I know the loneliness of being among others, a scent like a waltz at low volume. I suspect only egomaniacs like this much solitude, but like me fire never says enough. Fire my good dog, my work-shirt. Everything living holds heat, even the long, cool leaves of plants, their gestures as subtle as hungry guests moving tentatively in a kitchen. Wind blew in a poem, and then outside all day as if it were starving flame. Who knows how the wind feels about its job of touching everything, how it lives this omnivorous love and whether it speaks a word to everything it touches.
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