Conspiracy: literally, breathing together. Every week or two now, a poem would go in the mail to Carol, and one from her to me. We began incompletely different places, shooting in the dark, but quickly felt our way to a workable form of address, a courtly sort of confessional. My conspiracy lines—like my table thoughts—were all about the calamity, though for a while I couched my terms. I wrote about the white-stripe snake in Franklin Canyon and his “one medium mouse a month.” About being allergic to bees, and the cloud of killer swarms advancing toward Texas. Shot through every fragment are
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