My office chair is not a bit like this old, throned, well-oiled wheel of my mad tongue’s master; yet I had her in it. Stiff, without style, and with a mousy little squeak. Lou. Like one of the dime-store trinkets she sold. Like a piece of freshly picked and bitten history. Fuck the facts, honey Fuck’em. And they will spend themselves like money. To leave you limp with afterlonging. Why are you so mean to me, she said, when all I want is my fair slice of your life, its sordid boons? “All I want,” we always begin, when we pretend we mean “just a little.” All I want: I want to lay the world waste like its moon. I do not understand why a body should be so appealing—so warm in winter, so cool through every heat, so calm beneath my lone excitement. Coy, she came after hours. Triste. Straight from the Woolworth where, improbably, she worked to pay her way into my class. Climb the stairs to my cloud-shrouded office. Drag a book bag. Straddle the arms of my varnish-yellow chair. Her loveliness awash my life, I went down gladly, colors flying. Chair means ‘flesh’ in French. La Verbe s’est faite chair. Thus and So the mind slips. There was not a single jingle from her, not the barest bracelet rattle, not a sigh. And when my book appears, will they award me a watch, a dazzled stare? bucks from the bank? kudos from the crowd? a laud from the Leathered Overlords? or even one moan of dispassionate pleasure? Will they distinguish me from the ruck in the chain stores—with a taller stack? In a Porky Pig’s eye. I, in my solitary self, am the fat chance. She knew she was A LASS WITHOUT A LACK. And I a groan. Put my small penis in her. Only the chair was moved. And I came like an ad in the mail. Yet beyond the bitterness now, I can still taste the sweet gift, the tater-sweet shiver of her inner thigh. Life in a chair. I found her mouth in a moue in the Five & Dime where she worked. Not in scarves, confections, stationery, housewares, toddlers, paints. In jewelry. In junk. One bracelet on her wrist like one of my mother’s rings of wire. In a purse. In a pout. In a pique. The yearn was immediate, like being struck by the sun. And I fell upon her arm like Irish light.

* * *

} In this empty hour the light takes on an imprisoned harshness. Through its window my cell glows like a single bulb. It is that speck of life you sometimes see from a plane, starleak in the darkness, or a solitary seabird resting on some moonless ocean, poised (wouldn’t Governali love to put it?) above the abyss, yes—on the last branch of a broken faith. Loneliness enlarges thought till it pushes every shadow from my study. In grander moments I think of this space as my skull, and my consciousness as a dinging bell and warning beacon. Who shall be my companion through this fearful early morning? On my diary-troubled desk, Gide has fallen open like an omen, though I do not investigate the text. Instead, I remember how, as a young man, he resented the fact that no one guessed his genius from the look in his eyes, or divined the great works to come; while I worry that what Eve written will show in my eyes as plainly as the pupil, and in the shifty color of a bruise. AH, but when did his mirror tell him he’d be pleased to bugger little boys and later make a dirty breast of it? He brags he was lost—lost like a weed in a meadow—lost the day he began his book (the André Walter Cahiers, I believe), while I was damned the day I concluded mine (if I can bear to copy my page out like a lesson):