Young Girls Are Sad. They

Once Upon A Time, When Men And Women Hurtled Through The Air On Metal Wings, When They Wore Webbed Feet And Walked On The Bottom Of The Sea, Learning The Speech Of Whales And The Songs Of The Dolphins, When Pearly-fleshed And Jewelled Apparitions Of Texan Herdsmen And Houris Shimmered In The Dusk On Nicaraguan Hillsides, When Folk In Norway And Tasmania In Dead Of Winter Could Dream Of Fresh Strawberries, Dates, Guavas And Passion Fruits And Find Them Spread Next Morning On Their Tables, There Was A Woman Who Was Largely Irrelevant, And Therefore Happy.

On Buses And Trains, I Always Think About The Inexhaustible Variety Of Human Genes. We See Types, And Occasionally Twins, But Never Doubles. All Faces Are Unique, And This Is Exhilarating, Despite The Increasingly Plastic Similarity Of Tv Stars And Actors.

An Odd Phrase, "by Heart," He Would Add, As Though Poems Were Stored In The Bloodstream.

As A Little Girl, I Didn't Like Stories About Little Girls. I Liked Stories About Dragons And Beasts And Princes And Princesses And Fear And Terror And The Four Musketeers And Almost Anything Other Than Nice Little Girls Making Moral Decisions About Whether To Tell The Teacher About What The Other Little Girl Did Or Did Not Do.

Think Of This - That The Writer Wrote Alone, And The Reader Read Alone, And They Were Alone With Each Other.