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“You can't step into the same river twice“ —Heraclitus Sometimes you step into a river twice and it's the same river. The sky leans down just to show the importance of sky, Boys on the bridge are throwing rocks, carelessly, at elusive carp in that changeless river. They do not think of the love they…

He slapped her—just once, not hard—when she fainted, and it's the shocked, ashamed way he tucked his right hand inside that pouch between the calf and thigh the body forms when it crouches that makes me sure they have never as much as thought of hitting or getting hit for pleasure, in their secret life….

Koslowski tends towards exaggerated consequences. Since, for example, being shot at by British dive bombers during World War Two because of a highly visible brilliant red knit hat, he hates all knit hats, no matter what their color.

In religion class we argued about the weather in heaven. Was it always sunny? or did it rain once a century for contrast? I said perfect meant perfect— sky would always be cloudless, the sun at meridian, shining evenly through translucent saints, who, like a stained glass dome, would project their colors— martyr red, hermit…

Matthew 27.50,51 What can still bleed is not yet food. In the ninth hour Jesus howled and his wounds' crusts were opened. Blood repainted its dried trails. He felt the scourge's language on his back burn for interpretation, final insight, some emphatic look into the memoirs of the Cruel, the Other. But none came. His…

For a while it happened that Koslowski, a notorious sleepwalker, would leave his bed every night, wander through the harbor areas, return somehow, and in any case wake up utterly filthy in the cellar on a pile of coal and briquettes. In order to out-smart himself, so to speak, Koslowski has lately taken to lying…

Last night, when drunken cries and ugly music poured from open windows of apartments, and the street outside my door was echoing with shouts of boys and girls in open cars, I typed my application, cheerfully, for a teaching job up in Alaska. Who cares if night lasts half a year as long as cold…

The hangman weeps. He kneels and begs forgiveness of your shoes. OK, OK, you nod, and your headbag's spice, its tropical jute bouquet, grows subtler, like some wine you are adrift in. This the hangman frantically understands, and everyone here, in sunlight and authentically ash-blackened sackcloth, deeply feels. Now we lay us down to dream…