Wait, for now. Distrust everything, if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven't they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become lovely again. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait. Don't go too early. You're tired. But everyone's tired. But no one is tired enough. Only wait a while and listen. Music of hair, Music of pain, music of looms weaving all our loves again. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, most of all to hear, the flute of your whole existence, rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

She claims to have seen his writing somewhere, and thus she now knows him as one would know an old friend. Where did you see this? Oh, I picked up that slim chapbook put out the creative writing program twice a year. Those poems are terrible. I have given up writing after they came out. No! I was really moved by them. How did you know it was me, when you walked to my table a few minutes ago. I saw that you had a tower of poetry books before you. You are very bold for a woman. Yes, I can be when I choose to be. And I think you are lonely. Yes, but not too terribly unhappy because of that. Why not? Because of poetry? Yes. That is pretentiousness.

Listen to this piece they are piping in now, it is by Mozart. It’s okay. I really don’t understand classical music. Me neither. But see how much beauty his soul could create. Soul! Where are you going with this metaphysical talk? Also I must tell you I am quite simple and I don’t really read books. I am fenced in by books. Besides what are you doing in a bookstore if you don’t read? I came to buy a CD. You are lonely. No I am not, not when I am reading a book. What were you reading last night to sleep? Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Was it good? Yes, his long lists were like flamenco guitar riffs. Tell me one.

I don’t remember one fully now except the ending of one, roughly. Tell me…And shoot bolts of lighting into her cunt. He is talking about wanting to have sex with some woman. Who was this woman? Some muse perhaps? No, I think she was a whore he picked up in a Paris café. Men are animals because they don’t change after fucking. That is a cliché. Clichés are so because they are true. You should wear spectacles with a smaller frame. What is wrong with these? I like them; they give me larger vision when I have to squint at people. People? You mean women in bookstores? Yes. Women.

You have nice eyes. Thank you. You don’t know how to take compliments without depreciating them? How I did do that! Because I could read that from your face. And because you have been talking with me for the last half hour and haven’t said something nice to me. I notice everything but I don’t think all that noticed should be put into words, talk or writing. What did you first notice about me? You have parrot green eyes. Parrot! That is a bad adjective? No, but certainly not what I see when I look at myself in the mirror. Actually I am not sure if I would now call them parrot green either.

Are you depreciating a compliment again? I don’t know how to pay a really good one, I am handicapped. You are a poet. Yes, who tends to make up things. That was poetic. A flock of parrots whirling in the sky, screeching. Do my eyes screech? Yes, in a way they do for they seem to demand something. What? Words perhaps? Or even affection? I must tell you I am cold, I have become an animal. What kind of an animal are you? Some inconspicuous animal, whose shining eyes you see on the side of a dark highway as you zoom by.

So you don’t know yourself. Yes and no. I have a set of rules, which imprison me. But I am not even sure what those rules are. What do you mean rules? Limitations is perhaps a more accurate word for them. What limitations? I can’t romance you right now for example. Why would you want to do that? Because I want to shoot bolts of lighting on those large blank pages, orgiastic poems for you. Are you talking about masturbation? Yes, perhaps writing too is like masturbation, one does mysterious things to get out of despair and reach transcendence. I suppose I am waiting for myself to arrive.

My principal anguish, and the wellspring of all my joys and sorrows, has been the incessant merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh. . . . Every man partakes of the divine nature in both his spirit and his flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed; it is universal. . . . Struggle between the flesh and the spirit, rebellion and resistance, reconciliation and submission, and finally-the supreme purpose of the struggle-union with God: this was the ascent taken by Christ, the ascent which he invites us to take as well, following in his bloody tracks. . . .

If we are to be able to follow him, we must have a profound knowledge of His conflict, we must relive his anguish. . . . In order to mount to the Cross, the summit of sacrifice, and to God, the summit of immateriality, Christ passed through all the stages which the man who struggles passes through. All-and that is why his suffering is so familiar to us; that is why we pity him, and why his final victory seems to us so much our own future victory. That part of Christ's nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand him and love him and to pursue his Passion as though it were our own. If he had not within him this warm human element, he would never be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness; he would not be able to become a model for our lives. We struggle, we see him struggle also, and we find strength. We see that we are not all alone in the world; he is fighting at our side. . . . This book was written because I wanted to offer a supreme model to the man who struggles; I wanted to show him that he must not fear pain, temptation, or death-because all three can be conquered, all three have already been conquered.