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On one side a picture: tears boiling out of eyes that reflect flames. And a caption: “The frontier of the damned.” On the other side a note: “Thanks for the funeral. I’ve just arrived. Isn’t this beautiful? But it hurts. Write.”

Lily’s marking stock in the back where Walter sweeps and bets and makes boxes out of cardboard. Rose at the cash dreams Cracow. She’s got numbers on her arm. Eleanor threatens to call the union if my father calls her fat once more.           She’s fat. The code for thieves is nineteen; when Pauline shouts nineteen…

He is thinking of everyone he ever knew in no order, lets them come or go as they will. He wonders if he’ll see them again, if they’ll remember him, what they’ll do. There’s no surprise now, not the unexpected as it had been. He’s agreed to being more settled. Yet, like they say, as…

lights in the twilight, lights of Solvay over the expanse of frozen snow-covered      lake, orange lights of the refineries, yellow and green and red lights of the neon along the      strip, lights as if undersea, the argon just coming to exist, all lights in the cold moisture of the grounded wind staggering across the lake…

I am driftwood on his beach, without an Uncle or a radio. I used to be a Spanish ship. Thinking of Seville, mahogany, he picks me up feeling both superior and sorry. *     *      * Or I am brave and he is smaller than the smallest thing he can remember. They had him sit for hours…

No resolution, understanding when she comes abrupt, final anger, rage at the painful displacement, the brutal use of rational love, the meagerness of the intentional offering.

It is not music, though one has tried music. It is not nature, though one has tried The rose, the bluebird, and the bear. It is not death, though one has often died. None of these things is there. In the everywhere that is nowhere Neither the inside nor the outside Neither east nor west…

The constant X equals all variables: even strangers soon to be wonders just amount to X. Cistercians, all `sister’, in any case sexless, insist the last & best is left for X. So Wilde’s little swallow made children cry, don’t fly! But action is prayer for the poor and/or ill; just makes equal stone and…

Once started nothing stops but for moment breath’s caught time stays patient.