"Acts of Privacy" is, in part, an ironic title since I was fortunate, for a moment, to believe, as some more fortunate Buddhists and Taoists have that "we are all one body" and that individual identity is a Western illusion. The poem works for me with the almost surrealist felicity of juxtapositions--the recounting of lines from Chuang Tzu, the memory of a visit to a ceramics store in West Point, Mississippi, a story told to me by a graduate student about his visiting the ruins of an old factory on Russell Street in Starkville, Mississippi.
I conflated the two settings and blurred the bodily difference between the "you" and the "two friends" by means of the imagery--the rain and the wicker strap. The two friends have managed to suspend the Chianti between them by a wicker strap, and the rain has managed to suspend itself from the boards "like a chandelier." I was also under the impression that the nighttime rain refracted and reflected whatever light still existed in the scene down upon the glazed surfaces of the ceramic figures. The final couplet is, I think, original with my poem though I am sure it owes a great deal to my extensive reading of Taoist and Buddhist prose.