S) Outward yearning—he’s explaining in the dark car—and inward. Forces go outward, you know, like, you know, there are people who move outward with their lives. On the CD player, the Velvet Underground sing: “Coney Island Steeplechase.”—Ah, what the fuck am I trying to say? He raises his voice just a bit and it flattens itself against the windshield glass. What, in, the, fuck, am I saying? He repeats, and you laugh and run the length of your palm up the inside of his shirt.—I saw Lou Reed on the train. He was going toward Poughkeepsie, on the Metro-North, he says. He looked, well, you know, he looked like Lou Reed on a train. A bit old. Riding up the Hudson River.

T) Think of Marconi Station, the plates of steel set in cement, twisted bolts clutching empty air, those remnants of the great radio apparatus—square towers spun with wire that caught hold of the Titanic’s SOS call. The great trappings of myth. Think of the windswept silence of winter, the tourists gone, the information station unexamined: a model of the station beneath thick Plexiglas into which someone has scratched with great care: FUCK FUCKED FUCKER. In a few years the last of the bolts and footings will slip off the eroded cliff, eagerly into the sea.

—Hey what are, I mean what are we doing? I mean what are we going to do about this? Are we going to see each other. This can’t end.

—What are we, ah, I don’t know.

U) The dialogue continues around the central issue, which is, of course, exactly where do you stand and how do you stand. The dialogue above (in T) is interchangeable; either of you might say either part, although the force on the balance of scales—beloved /&/ lover—must be heavier on one side. You touch her lips with the back of your hand; there is a distinctive nip in the air, the hint of fall, and off through the trees a hollow wooden banging rises as someone boards up the windows for winter. That’s the house you’ve pinned some hope on, a quaint little saltbox that you both agree wants to be inhabited by lovers. It has that secretive nature you both want from an abode, hardly room for two, with a hand-painted sign adorned with honeysuckle and illegible script bearing the owner’s name, or the name they’ve given it. Quack weed edges up to the picket fence. To hole up there all winter with tinned meat and crackers and Scotch as supplies. Firewood and flesh on flesh as fuel. Bobby pins are stuck like needles into her hair; you adjust one as you speak and it falls out and slips beneath the seat.

V) A rude sunset. A sunset quivering sadly into the flat surface of the kettle pond. You can hardly see, staring dead-on into the horizon; yet you look and look because one is inclined to gaze into the water, across it, to see the other side. Soon you’re both in the water—cold but not unbearable; the drop-off is sharp. Kids down the way are swimming, tearing open the gloss. You hold her and she holds you and there is a scream down the way and an alert is passed from kid to kid that a snapping turtle is at hand.—Do they really snap, she says to you.—Hell yes, they snap like hell. You pop a pencil into their mouths and they bite right through. Do the same to your fingers, too. The kids are young, maybe six or seven, splashing and breaking apart the silence. Sadly you heft the weight of this woman—fingers along her hips. Water and buoyancy; the conspiracy of landscape and the human that comes into everything and lends itself to blame. Blame the landscape, the Cape, the sea, the water, her skin, your lips, your tongues, the sand, grace, heart, failures.