It would, Sister Marietta said, have broken your hearts to see it. They meant so well, she said, and such a terrible thing came here with their love. Sometimes from the gym floor with its sweet, heady smell of varnish I'd see her in the entryway looking for me, and I'd bounce the ball two or three times, study the orange rim as if it were, which it was, the true level of the world, the one sure thing the power in my hands could summon. I'd bounce the ball once more, feel the grain of the leather in my fingertips and shoot. We use this particular noun to secure the pathos of the child's point of view and to hold her responsible.
Fear is a teacher.
Sometimes you thought that Nothing could reach her, Nothing can reach you. The green flowerheads look like wombs or the upright, supplicant bulbs of a vegetal pre-erection. The insect lovers seem to be transferring the cosmos into each other by attaching at the tail, holding utterly still, and quivering intently. That they mate and are done with mating. They don't carry all this half-mated longing up out of childhood and then go looking for it everywhere.