Her hair is the same colour as the ship. I can almost see the captain. He is saying something to one of the crew.

Now she takes the thermometer out of her mouth, looks at it, smiles, everything is all right, and puts it away in a little lilac carrying-case.

The sailor does not understand what the captain said, so the captain has to repeat it.

A Study in California Flowers

Oh, suddenly it’s nothing to see on the way and it’s nothing when I get there, and I’m in a coffee-house, listening to a woman talk who’s wearing more clothes than I have money in the world.

She is adorned in yellow and jewellery and a language that I cannot understand. She is talking about something that is of no importance, insisting on it. I can tell all this because the man who is with her will buy none of it, and stares absent-mindedly at the universe.

The man has not spoken a word since they sat down here with cups of espresso coffee accompanying them like small black dogs. Perhaps he does not care to speak any more. I think he is her husband.

Suddenly she breaks into English. She says, ‘He should know. They’re his flowers,’ in the only language I understand and there’s no reply echoing all the way back to the beginning where nothing could ever have been any different.

I was born forever to chronicle this: I don’t know these people and they aren’t my flowers.

The Betrayed Kingdom

This love story took place during the last spring of the Beat Generation. She must be in her middle thirties and I wonder what she’s doing now and if she still goes to parties.

Her name slips my memory. It has joined all the other names that I have forgotten that swirl through my head like a tide pool of discontinued faces and invisible syllables.

She lived in Berkeley and I saw her often at the parties I attended that spring.

She’d come to a party all sexied up and really move it around and drink wine and flirt until midnight came and then she’d lay her scene on whomever was trying to get into her pants, which happened to be a lot of my friends who had cars. One after another they answered the fate that she had waiting for them.

‘Is anyone driving to Berkeley? I need a ride to Berkeley,’ she would always announce erotically. She wore a little gold watch to keep track of the midnight.

One of my friends would always say yes behind too much wine and drive her to Berkeley and she’d let them into her little apartment and then tell them that she wouldn’t go to bed with them, that she didn’t sleep with anybody, but if they wanted to, they could sleep on her floor. She had an extra wool blanket.