A.	Australian mates range from an impoverished widower from the same side of 
	your freeway who paints houses gray to the girl with salmon-pink socks from 
	your third-year French class. A mate is not necessarily the person you bed down 
	with. That may be someone else. 

B.	Imagine a frayed red-and-white tablecloth. Sunburned hands sop up the spill of 
	pinot noir on an August picnic table set with more humidity than protein. You are 
	sitting under one cloud of unspoken sympathy with a friend’s story of how she was 
	raped. You also think of the young black teenager that police shot last night. 
  
C.	Visualize a jump from a red to a black square on the board. You’re chasing kings, 
	risking loss of pawn-power. The doorbell rings, the Portuguese Water Dog knocks 
	over an aspidistra, smashing a green Shawnee pot. 

D.	The crosshatched cracks in the concrete commons that will break your mother’s back – 
	if you step on moss, do you believe you will hurt her?
      
E.	Hugging a former husband in front of neighbors known for gossip.

F.	The bullied high school teenager who hangs himself two weeks after graduation. 

G.	The retired banker who leaves out one-eighth of a cup of antifreeze for his neighbor’s 
	barking beagle. 

H.	Moving toward candlelit lovemaking on a stormy January night. The power company 
	hotline insists the lights may come on any minute. A squirrel fried in the rigging. 
	Neither lover remembers which switches are flipped on, which off.   

I.	A brain hiccough bigger than when one spouse spells checkered, the other chequered. 
	More like when well-worn, stable plaids of relationship go zigzag, one squabble 
	off-kiltering another.

J.	Do you seek the robot petting zoo to keep your loneliness a secret? 

				All of the above? 

					None?
                        

Buddha’s white stallion carried him from the palace
away from noble warrior games and jumped the river.
When Siddhartha tied the proud Kinthaka to a tree,
the young bridegroom fled for freedom, to roam, 
find his way, and broke the loyal horse’s heart.
A heart that returned after death as a follower. 
This horse carved on stupas, painted, sketched – the Way
starts as a mounted man on a path out of town. 

Elsie Stevens could have claimed I am the woman 
on the Liberty dime. She never did. Historians did,
compared her image to a sculpture of her 
that Adolph Weinman made at another time, stressed
that Stevens and Weinman lived in the same building. 
Liberty’s feathered cap for freedom of thought 
on a wife who kept separate worlds, rooms apart,
strained and uncertain under his crystal chandeliers.  

Supporting actors, perhaps, of heartbreak, those who wait,
never shake loose obligations and adorations. The reward
to secondaries in the ranks, faithful. Who we each might be.