Consider the strange links of time; the old burning cigarettes the good god smoked half way down and left to leave their inconclusive arguments for eternity in the restless air. You wander into one or another unfrequented wing of the museum and see the brief and inconclusive evidence of the statues and paint, and you believe or you don’t believe, but it doesn’t much matter if the Babylonians actually walked through the Ishtar Gate or Kandinsky was mad as a loon when he saw bright houses in the distance or if he saw them at all. The paint is dried and the men are dead and you re-enact a play that has nothing to do with the finger pricked on the nib of a sharp clean pen swinging out blood black as a nightmare.

The bloodless, childless links: Erik in Oregon knows Mike from Sitka knows Morgan from somewhere else in Alaska. And then the left smoke, the unusually empty rooms succeeding one another, the leakiness of time. The dead horses stir. And nothing changes but when you leave, the whole world.

For you then the conclusion of my days: that no will ever love you as much as you love them; two people firing at each other in a dark field will miss most of the time, and if your heart is marked by the gods for inhuman marksmanship you will find that you will inevitably wound yourself more than anyone else. Strange bullets, these. You can allow yourself to be wounded and join the saints in clean contemplation of the vast futile power of love, or you can refuse to let it make its dirty little nests in your body, and you will always have an unnatural power over words or men or whatever you turn your heart to.