OCCUPANT
The sad mailbox of my extreme youth, what did it ever deliver? The only...

A CRITIC
Pick up your socks. Clean the house once in a while. Go to the dentist. ...

HISTORIAN
Piles and piles of books, boxes of documents, photographs, bones, shreds of clothes...

YOU WHO KNOW
I was just enough bigger that I could wrestle you into the clean straw of the mow...

GRIFFY LAKE
I spread my smooth water like a lap and caught the trees' faces where they fell...

Dear Eric,

I was just enough bigger that I could wrestle you into the clean 
straw of the mow. I remember the way I pushed my weight and  muscle 
against yours, and the mixed feeling of straw, soft as a couch but 
able to scratch, or even to stab.
	
The smell of straw, and barns with the living sounds of animals, 
and heavy cotton clothes, and high-raftered spaces with shadows 
big as a tent were parts of a world familiar to me. I was my 
natural self there, beyond denying.
	
It was a boy's fire that burned in me then, to subdue you. We 
twisted and rolled, and my shoulders clashed with yours. My hands 
got free, and I groped to get hold of the thing in you that made 
your eyes dark. That was what I was wrestling for, maybe, all 
along: your enigma, the part of you that retreated and slid away, 
or when cornered said no no no.

You Know Who


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