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On that stormy night a top branch broke off on the biggest tree in my garden. It’s still up there. Though its leaves are withered black among the green the living branches won’t let it fall.

We’d met by chance. Once. Late at night. Me, off the ship Pireus harbour, banging loudly on your door for entry, shouting in the dark: Fo Fo! Fo Fo! You in there not answering. Busy? A friend? Fo Fo! Open up. It’s only me Fo Fo. Finally the door opens a measure on its chain…

Although I am taking courses in the language of children, penguin socialization and creative writing, now, in my dotage — dotage, what a striking word — I find myself betrayed — betrayed — by what? Betrayed! That’s what it means to be human. First acceptance, then rage, then reiteration. Once dinner was always exactly at…

Robin, I watch you. You are perfect robin — except, shouldn’t you be perched on a spade handle? Robin, you watch me. Am I perfect man — except, shouldn’t I have poison in my pocket, a gun in my hand? I, too, am in my winter plumage, not unlike yours, except, the red is in…

He’s everywhere here; not as he looks in his photos but in his mind, habits — that elegantly refined, withdrawn decadence. I glimpse or pass him everywhere: at night walking quickly down a back alley close to the walls’ shadow, afternoons in a teahouse alone glancing over the edge of his foreign newspaper, the rims…

Trunk, branches, leaves — sere and blemished — I am not what I wanted. Dignity is a hindrance. I am weighted with notions and unbalanced by fear. Night sweats, vapours. Why am I frightened alone on the street? Nothing’s here — a pair of brown squirrels — a few fallen apples — These rococco grimaces,…

I like almost imperceptibles, near still lifes — a limpet sloping full-tilt down a rock: thunder mooching among mountains, trailing delicate diminuendos: a mushroom hoisting a paving slab on its darning-egg head: and the brooch on her dress rising so quietly, so quietly falling. Don’t judge me by that: I like suddennesses too — fistfuls,…

— Wittgenstein, Tractatus The world is everything that is the case From the fly giving up in the coal-shed To the winged Victory of Samothrace. Give blame, praise, to the fumbling God Who hides, shame-facedly, His agèd face; Whose sun retires behind its veil of cloud. The world, though, is also so much more —…

We drive up the winding road lined by graying sycamores, a blessing in the summer heat. At a small table, between the stones, a man and two women nibble crustless sandwiches, pour from a silver pot of tea. They have their arrangements: dour frigidity of gladioli, faded dresses, a musty gentility. We have brought a…