Science or story or just the unfolding of the sound of the syllables : I telephone my collage roommate whom I have known for forty years but haven't seen for probably five. She whispers almost without effect of the stage four cancer in the lung, near the heart, of her third husband. There are scientists about whom whole plays are being written today. There are dusty orange petals like tied tongues trapped behind our girlish ears. There is the sound of no sound to know how to respond. The confluence is profile, mine, and straight ahead stare, hers, heard through the wires of San Diego tributary electricity finding me in Santa Fe near a dirt rodeo, with all the things I could say. Dogs and cats and no rain. A heat spell on her coast. My husband plants displaced yucca spears in our side yard, willing them back to green from cantaloupe grey. And I hear myself saying to her "he's doing to die" as if she didn't already know this. And I prescribe whe...