Only our love of closures
Keeps us longing
For bridges, tunnels, hands
But there was no
Common pathway ahead
no
You that way .
..
Ending some comedy
as holding out
Against time, holding out
Both hands and hope
Only our lust
For soft connections still
Keeps us in quest
Of some clear syntax here.
Both, neither, said:
We this way
-
a confirmed
Deferral or
Contemporary sort
Of difference
As if it were a word
Enough, though, of such literal narratives:
They had buttered their bread and eaten it.
Now distances shall not allow our straining
Eyes to track their faint courses any more
Where only the limitations of some page
Had made their ways seem to run parallel,
And only death would lay them lower than
The concrete actualities they walked
And leave them holding hands again with dust.
DONALD HALL
"Flaccus, drive
up
"
Flaccus, drive up from Providence to see us.
I'll
buy some bargain Scotch at aNew Hampshire
liquor store and we'll celebrate your new book
and that good review
in the
New York Times,
which you'll complain about
- I don't see how - while you denounce your old friends
for their usual treacheries; but after
two hours of kvetching,
