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60 Suicide Curve As I stomp and trample across years and even, unbelievably, decades, suicide dreams entertain less often, but still sometimes float past a window when, say, I’m sipping water and watching chickadees or perhaps jogging for a bus. No longer jagged, coarse, demanding, instead they glide with an easy fluid contour of caress or happy belly, the same shapes, I’ve just recognized, as four postcards decorating this table— Matisse’s Etude pour la decente de Croix, Picabia’s Femmes au bull-dog, Miro’s L’oiseau lunaire, Chagall’s Le Cirque bleu, utterly different in style and content, yet united by the luxuriousness of their forms—woman’s breasts and swooning back, followers delicately lowering a savior, a trapeze flier, a night bird flapping against its thick white heaviness. And, as I continue to look, two fat pears in a flowering bowl, an elbow of unripe fig, candle wax hardened into embrace of mother and child, even wine bottle as bud vase tightening to a sexy throat. All linked by impulses still as capable of eclipse as any downward stroke of wing, the arc of a single hand beckoning, or each comforting option. ...

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