Happy As A Clam, Is What My

This Has Been Her Problem All Her Life: Picturing Other People's Responses. She's Too Good At It. She Can Picture The Response Of Anyone--other People's Reactions, Their Emotions, Their Criticisms, Their Demands--but Somehow They Don't Reciprocate. Maybe They Can't. Maybe They Lack The Gift, If It Is One.

As With All Knowledge, Once You Knew It, You Couldn't Imagine How It Was That You Hadn't Known It Before.

The Weapons That Were Once Outside Sharpening Themselves On War Are Now Indoors There, In The Fortress, Fragile In Glass Cases; Why Is It (i'm Thinking Of The Careful Moulding Round The Stonework Archways) That In This Time, Such Elaborate Defences Keep Things That Are No Longer (much) Worth Defending?

And Sometimes It Happened, For A Time. That Kind Of Love Comes And Goes And Is Hard To Remember Afterwards, Like Pain. You Would Look At The Man One Day And You Would Think, I Loved You, And The Tense Would Be Past, And You Would Be Filled With A Sense Of Wonder, Because It Was Such An Amazing And Precarious And Dumb Thing To Have Done; And You Would Know Too Why Your Friends Have Been Evasive About It, At The Time.

The Cemetery Has ... An Inscription: 'though I Walk Through The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death I Will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me.' Yes, It Does Feel Deceptively Safer With Two; But Thou Is A Slippery Character. Every Thou I've Known Has Had A Way Of Going Missing.