Anne hides inside folding and unfolding rose after rose. She has no one.

For I became a 'we' and this imaginary 'we' became a kind of company when the big balloons did not bend over us.

All these things, all these dishes of things, come through the swinging door and I don't know from where? Give me some tomato aspic, Helen! I don't want to be alone.

My blood buzzes like a hornet's nest. I sit in a kitchen chair at a table set for one. The silverware is the same and the glass and the sugar bowl. I hear my lungs fill and expel, as in an operation. But I have no one left to tell.

And all this is a metaphor. An ordinary hand - just lonely for something to touch. . . that touches back.

I remember that I heard nothing myself. I was alone. I waited like a target.

I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind, just as yours is.

This loneliness is just an exile from God.

I am murdering the music we thought so special, that blazed between us, over and over. I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss. I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face. I am flying like a single red rose, leaving a jet stream of solitude and, yet, I feel nothing, though I fly and hurl, my insides are empty and my face is as blank as a wall.

I am helpless and thirsty and need shade, but there is no one to cover me - not even God.

I felt the rest of your body somewhere outside the wall, merely asking for an invitation. You stand now in a field in Maine, hopelessly alive.

Lacking the wit and depth that inform our dreams' bright landscapes, this countryside through which we walk is no less beautiful for being only what it seems. Rising from the dyed pool of its shade, the tree we lean against was never made to stand for something else, let alone ourselves. Nor were these fields and gullies planned with us in mind. We live unsettled lives and stay in a place only long enough to find we don't belong. Even the clouds, forming noiselessly overhead, are cloudy without resembling us and, storming the vacant air, don't take into account our present loneliness. And yet, why should we care? Already we are walking off as if to say, we are not here, we've always been away.