PABLO AND OLGA (123)

Your face is lovely in the pouring rain, with its features made unreal by the faint lines of flowing water. On the canvas behind me, you look like what you were, a bored dancer in an artist's room. Out here you come alive, turning and laughing in front of the pink rhododendrons that seem to set your marble flesh alight.

I look at you one last time, before I must attend to the drying pastels. My love for you is so powerful that it cannot be fully conceived in my mind, but rather sipped at like a strong and endless liquor. Beautiful Olga, like a Russian river running darkly and soulfully beneath the ice. When I am with you, I am absolved.

DREAMS OF BLACK CARS (93)

Nathan first had the dreams when he was a boy. Classic cars, with wide chassis and bodies like ocean steamliners, careering down country lanes. Everything would be in slow motion, and he would be too far away to prevent what was going to happen. He would start running, and he would see the black cars breaking their bodies against a man, whose face was always blurred. Their bonnets would rupture, though no driver flew through the splintering glass: he assumed, with the logic of dreams, that each car reformed around its own spectre.