[1] Watching a mother - a young woman, perhaps, as old as he has become; yes, some people he grew up with are now parents! - trying to manage her two frightfully beautiful daughters, the older one about three, dressed in a tropical patterned frock, and her younger sister, a toddler with new teeth in a baby carriage, trying out her tongue on speech and butter popcorn, he idly muses, given the years of enforced loneliness, which lead to a development of a taste for silence among other things, if he will ever come to the point of bear-hugging his own genetic information?

[2] After a long train journey, approaching the month of succulent June moon, he, who once retreated into a stand of wood, into a forest time every Sabbath, shivers in the rich green glare than envelopes him when he disembarks, many miles away from the spire-d city of stone and sewers.

[3] Years later in an airplane, while being harried across time zones, he distinctly remembers waking up one night in his boyhood to pee, only to overhear a conversation between his father and his father's visiting cousin, carried out in low voices, both lapsing back to their village time.

[4] Some sixty odd miles out of a big American metropolis, he wakes up from a drowsy sleep, his book on the floor of the bus, into a prairie landscape pockmarked by endless pustules of suburban tract houses, each house a Orwellian clone, dreamed up as an infantile version of the American Dream, fit only for the living dead, i.e., "consumers".

I wonder if that pool of rainwater embroidered by

foxtail, horse mane, wild garlic, burr, and barley,

by the highway tastes anything like the tang

I will soon feel in my mouth, holding her?