#61

Chris Marker. W v A. Jealous text. And Jon in slim tuxedo: Oxford stance with explicated tie. Ian's lurid Latin noted. Make of him something, trade. Asti. Ample bubs like beacons. Write it down, but do not say. Sing her name in other's ears. Yes I said yes I will yes, and more. Gretta pleached in plagiary. Remember the naked rose that wisdom kept.

Says: You said, your grandfather was, in Hong Kong, colonial overseer...?
J: Never said, never said.
Says: You said, yes, something, you said.
J: A friend of my parents, now a supreme court judge, that's who.
Says: Oh, yes, I remember, you said.

Clocks that fall, and darkness. Micah in the park. 1898 or so. Imagine, in front of a class: Not Bacon, Marlowe. But who (ask them) is W.H.? Write it. No wrong answer there. One scene, perhaps a riddle too. Invented phrase: JMR Hoverers. The glob of boys as buzzing flies. File that one. And restaurant name: Blue and Green. But closed. "What is," say, "green and hangs on a wall and whistles?"

#60

Micah, shorn, bounds up stairs to my heated apartment. Where there's a will.... A winter truce. "It will grow back soon" for every compliment. Downstairs, the Jamaican super rolls wet white lines along the walls. Trash outside in jutting black plastic. The clay Janus-head with its feminine scalp: bits of brown now stamped into the pavement. No more motorcycle parked in front. The crooked landing, crooked and landing...

Evan with groceries, handsome, mild, smiling. Calmer now than then. Has a place up north near the art museum; not much call for downtown these days. Perfect matrimony. Job in the suburbs. Fireplace lit, otherwise cold. "Save's money, that," Micha's eager non sequitur. My course has led nowhere. "Mill is closing down, I hear." Abrupt. Departure. Not me, not me, not me.

Wisdom. Wisdom. Buy a mask: "I'll be Krusty the Clown," she says. Not human hair, but horse I think. Too cold to be bare. Come with me. Purchase sesame buns and butter-cream. 60 cents a piece, a bargain. Do we trust it? A beverage cooler where the photo booth was. Tiny pictures with Hello Kitty backgrounds. Have some, Blake and me. Resistant, but miss it now. Buy Micah stickers instead. Inexpensive gesture.

Wisdom. Wisdom. Charles Dickens, but not the Pickwick Papers. Everyone wanting to see her books. Critical will is oriented. She will be dis-oriented. Come home and read Ulysses. Trick or treat. Take both.

#59

Trip to Seoul. Return. Jeehyun and I at tables dull in summer light. This street called . . . ? Spell it in signs. Remembering. Korea or Macao? Mom and dad in sandy cove, great crag and waterfall behind. Stone-hopping in white hightops. Photo-image: her raven hair, dark tresses streaming past shoulders, ripples in the breeze. Mine own bestrewn with lice, and the Korean barber who will not cut it close. "All of it off!" my father says, loud and slow, his hands flying round his head in scalping motions. And the word like a slew of pebbles from my tongue: Come-saw-hum-me-da. Silver light.

By the button, she holds his book, curlicues of critical marginalia: "Wants the form. No, but language barrier. p 137." She fingers her necklace. "Hey mates!" Square's faux-English. Descending the stairs, suit and tie. To the bench where we sit, and the voice nears. "What you pigeons doing?"

Not enough. So easy to sew in words. None of that sitting with words of our own, illuminated letters under lamplight. Never meant for another. In this book, read: "The hole that we all have." Between ass and mouth. Jeehyun's corner room in autumn. The cigarette in Erica's hand. In his copy of Stephen Hero, Jon has marked in pencil a line. Tentative signs: proof. All of this, recycle.

#58

Todd now, one more. The glob of boys grows...a monster. Apologize to Ben. But blame it on the liquor. Self-righteous coward. Is it written on my face? Jonathan's purple sweathsirt. Regal, popish, papal edict. Offers it to me, but what would I trade? I had a purple backpack once. Plaster it with stickers to avert their leers.

"Flaccid mind." Now there's a phrase. Mine. Jon was a masters student. But he had a Thouron. Tour on. But I stayed regardless. Would rather forget that. Reuben on my side, and that Freudian tribe. (Lynda). If death is not death, is it death? Carrion Rats: a deck of them would be gruesome. Bit like me, R. Syphyllis, I heard JM say. Frail with thick black scruff. Hairy plume? On the street another, different, but the brown tuft sprouting from his collar all the same. Save the Children. Rather save my pennies.

Leather-faced man on the corner past the Mill. Press pass, remember? Bouquet of flowers in his left hand. Haven't seen you in the coffee shop, he says. Because I'm no longer there: retort. Better this than that. Matthew faces east in window. Warm body. Probably still is. Hat or scarf. Hidden away, but find them. Would like some coffee too. I had a mother who could pray...

#57

Sketch my skins in lines, colour. Watermarks. The windows opened eastward. There I was in summer sun exposed. Free, until they cut me down. Her light on half my parts. "Tulips as tulips," I wrote. And a necklace of teeth for sowing. So reflect what you are, she said. Not me, long-haired and glinting though, afraid. The boy on the corner, and the neighborhood boys. Their success was undeniable.

She had two strings to her bow now, and a scut between her thighs. A cunt that bleeds. Smudge and smell: bleared and smeared. The word: jettison. Climb the steps on White Street. Summer blue beyond compare. Find me in a stranger's hall, she without the heart she won. It has flamed out, groundless in its roving grandeur.

#56

One mustn’t linger long in rain. Limber sapling that I am. She climbs – leg over leg – to meet him at the balustrade. Gray and wet and breathless. The delight of the eyes, rampart of memory. Tweed jacket, scraggy jaw. Polyphemus on the landing. Nose to nose. And a tooth for a tooth. The coupler’s will. Veil of mist, pneumatic grasp. I am a stripling, with soft hair and a languishing gaze. A scrag beneath the sky of dripping slat. Horizontal downpour. And no gamey gamp in hand. Tomorrow, she said, rehearse.

#54

The boys were there, pens in hand, marking lines through letters. Jack Sprat and lopping pal. The sway of ties to spondees. Camraderie, disguise. Difficult to swallow. Utensils brandished, slim spears for signatures. Words like cud and corpses bartered in fluorescent light. Fubsy scripting, not my thing. I am a jolly gay pedlar. Pillaged margins. Will no one buy? "Too much passive voice." "Your grammar a wee bit off." My exeunt occupied by screedsters.

#55

Fulminate on freedom, no. Tell us - not in writing - where you read. Western trains and all that. Colonial habitude. Not boys but fathers, boys. A stone-walled one-room flat, where they came and sat to hear your noise. Value happens to you, Greg. Like a contract, weekly, in writing. Return. The Jigbat arbiter: friend. Patern's accidents, a would-be language learned. And then? When your work has worked itself like magic... Hear! Hear! I am all askance and honey-tongued. Perhaps not discipline, but love.

#53

Do you read? Night hands, prick. The gardens and alley curves lit but empty now of sparrows. Lapis lazuli and delphinium respite. The time again we turned through pages noted, black. Dim tableaux, signed and numbered in graver imitation. "Like spilt wine on a linen tablecloth" perhaps. Or "the relief of leaving . . . overwhelms me." Artists creep in shadows, say, the pederast prey in scenes. Still you catch what come in thousands, fold them thrice in lines. Dapple hands and hearths and hues. In your quote book. Remember.

There is, as was, the counting sleight: too much on what's been had foretell. Curls that fall past pillows and eyes. Or vistas drawn on trains. That sleeping body, mine, exposed. A "transient gallery, Mr. Mapplethorpe, red velvet" on blue. Time it that way - and remember. Love of self, love of family . . . the distance fingers travel. Many good returns in speech and vision. Do you read? Slack grasp, praise. Then, like an image multiplied. Your two accounts, softened by your softened rise. Mind them in posted patterns. Turn.

#52

#51