An Almost Made Up Poem 
 I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny 
 blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny 
 they are small, and the fountain is in France 
 where you wrote me that last letter and 
 I answered and never heard from you again. 
 you used to write insane poems about 
 ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you 
 knew famous artists and most of them 
 were your lovers and I wrote back, it's all right, 
 go ahead, enter their lives, I'm not jealous 
 because we've never met, we got close once in 
 New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never 
 touched. so you went with the famous and wrote 
 about the famous, and, of course, what you found out 
 is that the famous are worried about 
 their fame's, not the beautiful young girl in bed 
 with them, who gives them that, and then awakens 
 in the morning to write upper case poems about 
 ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they've told 
 us, but listening to you I wasn't sure. maybe 
 it was the upper case. you were one of the 
 best female poets and I told the publishers, 
 editors, her, print her, she's mad but she's 
 magic, there's no lie in her fire. I loved you 
 like a man loves a woman he never touches, only 
 writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have 
 loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a 
 cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom, 
 but that didn't happen. your letters got sadder. 
 your lovers betrayed you. kid, i wrote back, all 
 lovers betray. it didn't help. you said 
 you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and 
 the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying 
 bench every night and wept for the lovers who had 
 hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never 
 heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide 
 3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you 
 I would probably have been unfair to you or you 
 to me. it was best like this.