Young Girls Are Sad. They Like To

Do I Do As False Prophets Do And Puff Air Into Simulacra? Am I A Sorcerer--like Macbeth's Witches--mixing Truth And Lies In Incandescent Shapes? Or Am I A Kind Of Very Minor Scribe Of A Prophetic Book--telling Such Truth As In Me Lies, With Aid Of Such Fiction As I Acknowledge Mine, As Prospero Acknowledged Caliban.

They Took To Silence. They Touched Each Other Without Comment And Without Progression. A Hand On A Hand, A Clothed Arm, Resting On An Arm. An Ankle Overlapping An Ankle, As They Sat On A Beach, And Not Removed. One Night They Fell Asleep, Side By Side... He Slept Curled Against Her Back, A Dark Comma Against Her Pale Elegant Phrase.

She Didn't Like To Be Talked About. Equally, She Didn't Like Not To Be Talked About, When The High-minded Chatter Rushed On As Though She Was Not There. There Was No Pleasing Her, In Fact. She Had The Grace, Even At Eleven, To Know There Was No Pleasing Her. She Thought A Lot, Analytically, About Other People's Feelings, And Had Only Just Begun To Realize That This Was Not Usual, And Not Reciprocated.

The Minds Of Stone Lovers Had Colonised Stones As Lichens Clung To Them With Golden Or Grey-green Florid Stains. The Human World Of Stones Is Caught In Organic Metaphors Like Flies In Amber. Words Came From Flesh And Hair And Plants. Reniform, Mammilated, Botryoidal, Dendrite, Haematite. Carnelian Is From Carnal, From Flesh. Serpentine And Lizardite Are Stone Reptiles ; Phyllite Is Leafy-green.

I Don't See Much Point In Doing Things For A Pure Joke. Every Now And Then You Need A Joke, But Not So Much As The People Who Spend All Their Lives Constructing Joke Palaces Think You Do.