Here's something I've never done before: I took one of my old poems (written some time in 2003) and cut it down into a drastically different version. You can check out the old version here: http://home.flash.net/~unlikely/whitesandand.html if you want to compare. I tried to select the strong, spare stuff, add a few little bones to the skeleton, and cut out the fat. I hope there never comes a day when I want to put everything I've ever written under the knife. But I enjoyed pruning this one:

white sand, red sun

I went on a white beach
to pick you flowers made of red fire
(there were none)
and it was a sun under my feet.
I let it burn until the earth
was torn away by its heat. I let it burn.
I went there to find you some shells
that the ocean had washed clean
their meat gone
their hour of oblivion and beauty come

I pictured them held in your hands
shimmering--
remnants from some underworld's broken skeleton
...an eternity swum and never reassembled.

I saw the water, mercury, uninfinite,
in its stretch toward
the false edge of this planet
the way the mist moves as the fish jump through it
and I wanted your hands on my body
to make my blood move
in the shadows of buildings
stretching their sun-drenched gravestones;

a leaf of paper falling sideways in its drift
and whispering on the skin of my hands.

later, over the bedside table
where the shells were drying,
I saw the hard light enter the hotel window
like something thrown from a mirrored universe.
all day I moved
like an aging helium balloon
dragging its string in the sand
toward a distant dock
until the children dragged their pails up
into shadows of adult umbrellas
in the backseat of the sun

the bluefish smashed their muscles against the air
the seashells warmed in the flesh of my hands
I looked at your picture through a distance of water
with the murdered gift so silent in my room
a small thing from the sea that cannot live.