So let's begin with Cheryl. Oh, this is so homey. Thank you very much. I'm going to begin with some prose. some chapters from a new novel that I'm working on called The Unexamined Wife. And it's the story of a married couple and everything that was not examined in the marriage. So it doesn't... I don't have to tell you the plot because we can't see it. But the people are called Anne and Ben, and Ben has a son named Bobby, and he lives with him sometimes. But it's a son by former marriage. So the first chapter I'll start with tonight is Down the Garden Path.

[01:08]

In this bed, the lavender bush never dies. It gets smaller. It is overlooked down here where one seldom passes. On the other hand, to the left, if one looks away from the house, is the camellia which refuses to flower. It is still wearing its original tag, picturing the kind of camellia it is, a very washed-out piece of paper. The azalea beneath it is also dying for no apparent reason. And the rhododendron is only a token of the forest where the tall foxgloves with their purple blossom thrive. But now the foxglove is tired and would like to take a little nap. It would like to lay its head down in the sweet strawberry patch. But here brambles are waiting to rip it to shreds. The Tangled Plant. Here a Tangled Plant lives that doesn't know why it exists. It persists without hope of ever getting straight. It just assumes that it's wanted. While it exists, it's almost impossible to see what's becoming stunted or choked beneath it.

[02:13]

But what does it matter? They're only babies, baby leaves with baby blossom, and now they are no more. That's all. The Strangling Tangled Plant has wiped them into the dirt. the listening tree. This is the tree that's pretending not to listen. But actually, it started the whole thing. Anne was not entirely aware which tree the branches she was watching waving in her window went to. In her wanderings outside the house, when she came up against the trunk of this tree, she didn't see its branches. But it's true, she rarely came up against the trunk of this tree. She came up against the mock orange in front of it. She wouldn't see the huge trunk of this huge tree, which was taking over everything with its humble little acorns, and, presumably, its roots, which undermined everything, both the garden and the house, while Anne was not aware of them. Anne ventures out. Ben had many projects going at once in the peripheries of the garden and the furthest extremes of the property invisible from the house.

[03:17]

There was the gatepost of the future entrance into the potential goat pen to be set into cement. There were the rose bushes to move from one side of the driveway to the other and back again and the holes he would dig for them after he had soaked the ground with his hose. There was the pair of Italian cypresses, the tree that grows in graveyards side by side and staggered in reference to the setting sun. Ben had many tomatoes to water, and they needed, he informed Anne, to be watered slowly. He moved the hose patiently back and forth as it dribbled. These plants, overbearing with fruit, needed to be staked. He pounded the stakes deep into the dirt. The dirt needed to be fertilized. He needed shit. Sometimes, Anne wondered if he really was out in the garden. If the phone rang for him, she would say, just a minute, and go to the porch to call his name. There was no answer. She went to call from the back door, but still there was no answer. She started walking down the driveway. She walked up and down and on each slope of the property, but there was nobody.

[04:20]

When Ann got back to the house, there was nobody there either. Anne did not always see the sense in each little project Ben committed out in the garden, but she always assured him that they were marvelous when he asked her how she liked his fences, which fell down as soon as they were erected, or his gates, which just stood there without fences, shut and bolted fast. Who was Anne to judge? She couldn't picture how everything would eventually come together sometime in the future. She stepped over another pile of rotting lumber. But one day, when Ben had been away for several days on business and noticed that the sun did shine very brightly in the yard, she went to the garage to get a spade. There was a project out in the garden which wanted her attention. She must try to resurrect the bed closest to the house. For while Ben had many projects started at the very end of the garden, the bed closest to the house had gone untended. Once flowers had grown in this bed, but some years ago there was a terrible frost, and the flowers had blackened and died.

[05:21]

Then this bed was brown and bare, and then the rains came down and the thistles began to grow all down the path and up the house. These Anne had suffered because of their intimidating spikes. Now she approached them. She was soon surprised at how easy it was, actually, to bring down these foes, for the spiky thistle has neither muscle nor heart, and is easily pulled apart. The Blockage One dreary Christmas day, little Bobby went to his real mother's for the holiday. There wasn't any holiday here. How could one day make up for the rest? Anne wanted to know. This day was colder and darker than most days, perhaps because little Bobby had left a hole in the house. dear friends were about to make their yearly visit. Through the eyes of these house guests, Anne and Ben would be able to see what a wonderful life they were living. They were no sooner there long enough for everybody to have looked into the toilet when it was Anne's turn.

[06:27]

She no sooner left the fire smoking than was alone with herself in the can when she was flush with what she was forced to see. She flushed and flushed, but could not dispose of it. The more she flushed, the worse it got. The swirling mass rose higher and higher. It was running. It was going to overflow. She returned to the living room, joining her guests. Anne was afraid. It was a holiday weekend, and her plumbing was illegal. Often Anne had wanted to have a baby, but Ben would never hear of it. Anne moved alternately between the living room where everyone smiled pleasantly and the bathroom where the turds floated around in a row. The hydrangea bush under the porch began to reek of urine. Finally, a plumber agreed to come, although it went against his conscience. He was but two hours along with the toilet when he presented Anne with the bill. There was nothing he could do. He washed his hands. The toilet emptied into a tiny redwood box on the western slope, above which grew a willow tree fed by shit until it got taller and taller and bigger and bigger and its roots got broader and broader and filled the little box all the way up, pushing the shit back up the pipes, killing its only source of pleasure.

[07:42]

It would be dead within two years. Em needed a snake. Many times, Em had considered adultery, especially with her neighbors. The snake unwound into the ground. Anne would do anything for the man with the snake, but he presented her with a bill and told her he could do nothing for her. The smell of urine was taking over her world. The annunciation had come actually two months earlier. Anne had been away from home on her way to a night class. She was walking from her car to the classroom when suddenly there was a large crash of thunder. Suddenly the wind began to blow at a hundred miles an hour. Then a heavy torrent of rain crashed down upon her, wetting her to the bone. She was in ecstasy. That night, however, when she came home, she saw that the huge retaining wall next to the house was now leaning over it, and there was nothing to stop the hill that it held back from falling into the house. The pity was the wall had been a work of art, and the real pity was that the hill felt better without the wall.

[08:45]

But Anne ignored God's warning, and that's how she found herself sitting outside on a chemical toilet, grateful to be sitting here. It had been her father's idea. It would be months and months, months of going outside in the rain to pee. Somehow, Anne preferred it this way. Once she escaped from the house, she was free, and sitting with the rain pattering all around her and the door flung open in the dark, she was at peace. The model couple. In the community where Anne and Ben lived, there was one remarkable couple, whom everybody loved, who had been married for about 70 years. They had run away together when they were very young. Their romance would always be in flower. When in company, the company would love to hear the stories they told over and over, sometimes one telling, sometimes the other, about the events in their long life together. These two were indeed an institution and an inspiration.

[09:49]

what they knew about each other down to the last detail, how their lives deepened year after year. Or, Ben said, but only to Anne, and only after they had been married for several years, how they are in prison. Anne wanted to see it that way, too, because she wanted Ben to be right so that she could believe in him until the end of time. the wife in a box. Anne knew that Ben had been married before, not only to Beth, the real mother of little Bobby, but before that also to another woman, Mimi, an artist, who Anne had never met. Anne liked to hear stories about Mimi, the woman who had loved Ben when he was very young, long before Anne had had the opportunity to know him. And in the stories, Anne would fantasize that she was Mimi. And Anne loved Mimi, even though she and Ben would never see each other again.

[10:53]

That was not, however, how Anne felt about Beth, who she saw all the time. Beth, unlike Anne, had chosen to cross into middle age. But Mimi, like Anne, was forever young, at least like Anne when she had first met Ben some years ago now. Beth had just been a seven-year interim relationship between Mimi and herself. Of course, there were ways in which Anne was unlike Mimi. Mimi used to like to fight. That's why she and Ben, unlike Anne and Ben, had broken up. Anne didn't see the point of fighting. Beth and Ben had broken up as soon as he had gotten up the courage, but not before she had gotten a little screaming baby out of him. The little baby had screamed him out of the house. Beth had been more in love with the idea of having a baby than she was with Ben. No one was more in love with Ben than Anne. At least, that's what Anne always assumed. One ordinary day, Anne was home alone. Ben was away on a business trip.

[11:54]

She used to resent Ben for not taking her along, but she no longer did. She realized how happy she was to do exactly as she pleased. She decided she would clean out some cupboards. The cupboards had started out fresh when Anne had first met Ben, but over the years had collected layers of memories, and some of the memories predated even Anne's existence. For instance, take this tin box with the lock on it. Anne had seen this tin box with a lock on it for years, but had never been shown what was inside of it. For all she knew, there was nothing inside, but it was heavy. Anne knew that she shouldn't look into the box, look into what Ben did not show her about himself. She was afraid as she tried the lock. It opened. Anne began to leaf through the papers. Some of them were clippings from Ben's college newspaper, the place where Ben and Mimi had met. And here was a large glossy picture of Mimi. Here was an old menu from a restaurant. More pictures, Mimi in different poses. A lock of hair. Anne hastily shut the lid.

[12:56]

But it was too late. Anne had seen it, a wife in a box. a terrible stereo. Anne and Ben had a terrible stereo. It was very cheap. They had bought it from the previous occupant. It was very large. They didn't know how they could get it out. It was a bargain in the shape of a blonde wooden coffin standing on four legs with a lid that opened with a hinge. It played stacks of records indiscriminately, or its radio played loud enough from its corner, horrible to look at, to obliterate not only the birds and the bushes and the incredible silence, but also each member of the house from the other. Its speakers were very close together, but it cancelled little Bobby's TV in his room upstairs, and the living room where Ben was working on his papers, and the study where Anne paid the bills.

[14:00]

And it neutralized the atmosphere, no matter that it was ugly. And this is the last of these chapters that I'll read. Their Dog. Anne and Ben had a dog. It was called the family dog, but Ann fed it and took it to the vet and bought its license and walked it and vacuumed up its fur from the floor and the couch where it wasn't supposed to go but would always sneak onto and no one had the will to make it stay down. Ben had wanted the dog to live outside in the garage, but Ann had invited it in, hearing its whimpering. It loved to come in and sit on the couch by the fire and also to roam free all around the neighborhood. But one day the dog catcher came and scooped the dog up. Ann had to buy him back from the pound where he contracted kennel cough and a handsome vet bill. Ben proposed putting the dog on a chain outside fastened to a post in the yard. But Ann couldn't tolerate the sight of the dog so chained up. And she felt herself powerless to build a fence the dog couldn't dig under.

[15:03]

And that's how the dog took up permanent residence in the house. Ann would walk him every morning and would try to walk him in the evenings also, but he mainly spent the winters in the artificial heat half asleep. Ann and Ben looked at him. He seemed to be getting old. His coat was dull and he smelled like a pelt. They looked at each other. Where had the time gone? And looked away. Well, concurrently with working on this book, I'm also working on poems which I call from the window because I always look out of the same window and write exactly what I see. And so I'll round out my reading with a few of those poems. And this first one I'll read is In the Window at Sunset.

[16:05]

First the mountains fade, then all the shapes of the earth fade into one flat without perspective. The sky deepens and against the blackness into which I have been peering, a figure appears dressed in white and writing at this table. The happy object. Once upon a time, there was an object which made everyone happy. You can imagine how happy it felt. Three movements. A frenzied bug moving over the window, irrationally, my baby kicking inside of me, the orange flower opening. Our baby. You throbbing inside me, our baby. Between movements.

[17:17]

In the evening, the bushes chatted amongst themselves. Those in the house overheard them between movements. And this is one I wrote for a friend who wanted to know if he should get pregnant. He isn't, but he tried. This is have a baby mantra for William S. First you are a baby, then you grow up. Then you have a baby, then you are a baby, then you grow up. Then you have a baby, then you are a baby. This is one that everyone thinks I wrote since I got pregnant, but it was actually last summer. And it seems to be about that, so much for autobiography.

[18:22]

In My Belly. This feeling of pleasure I have in my belly can go on forever. Neither pain nor hunger can withstand it. Even in adversity or in the university, against the gray of the skies, my pleasure rises. How can I tell you how it comes as a surprise to remember the love in every object? So let us always remember, even in September, when the leaves are yellowing, and let this be the reminder in dark December, when distance encroaches and the long dark time tries to divide us, that this place exists inside us. Yellow The disease, enjoyed by camellias, alternately parched by the sun and leached of all nourishment and rain, is expressed in awkward gestures, attenuated reaching up to the window, so far in the foreground they can be overlooked.

[19:28]

They are yellow. Unobtrusive. Everything is preparing behind the scenes the actors put on their makeup for their scheduled appearances. And unobtrusive, under the stairs, they are starching the collars and pinning in pleats. They are arranging flowers, and then they remove the skin from what they have been cooking, and the bones come out so easily that no one is aware of them. I've noticed that there's a lot of bones and things like that. I think it's that, even though that's before I was pregnant, also it seems to be really concerned with bones and muscles and what a body is. I think this one's more a theory. Dancing with A.

[20:32]

Here we are in the Alps, higher than anyone. I've been climbing all my life, and I wasn't always sure I would make it up here to this heavenly mountain meadow. I didn't trust my body or the great body of time to keep carrying me upwards. It hasn't been easy struggling to breathe this thin air. Sometimes I even lost feeling in my extremities, my knees buckled, my ears held back sound. I couldn't imagine taking another step. The light was in my eyes so that I wondered when at last I arrived here if I had been blinded. The view was so clear, and you saw it too, having arrived here by another route. I looked at you for the first time, taking in the whole panorama, all downhill from here. This is the modern way. All the sensible, risk-free avenues you can choose from could someday be cut down in bad taste by somebody modernizing, somebody trying to make his mark on the view unaware of you.

[21:42]

Low down. down below us, all around us, in the world's bowl, so many people thriving and striving and dividing, intertwining and not knowing where they are going, down below us, all around us. Forgive and forget. Let's see. I've lost interest in my life. All I care about is living. Life is so forgiving. When I ride at my window, I always do it at sunset. And I think that's a very magical time for me. But sometimes it's a problem, because as soon as it gets dark, I can see my reflection in the window, but I can't work there anymore.

[22:51]

This is so strange. So that's sort of the signal. So it's really tenuous, sitting there and hoping that it won't get dark and hoping that it will sort of. But this is dialectic. Wait! It can't get dark yet. I'm not ready for the night. And yet this is the most wonderful delight, day and night. Mm-hmm. This is writing Alan, really poor Alan. to worship every day here with you, a daily ritual of realizing this moment you are the one for me, the only one, and I shall hold no others before you. I adore you, and even when I remember the dead as I must, I hear your voice inside speaking. My head is bowed for the benediction, and up the staircase the words begin to move.

[23:54]

I often teach when I can get a job. And one of the things that I teach is composition. And I'm always having to teach IT apostrophe S is different from ITS. And so this is the, in the title of this, the title of this is, and it's blood. It's IT apostrophe S, which always means it is, you know, portion. Not possessive. And it's blood, or and it is blood. Now let peace be restored, now that the light has been released from the mountains and the clouds and the trees and the sky. The world at last has turned its face to the sun, its hair to the wind and its blood. And I'm just going to end with this one, which is a lot of writers like to use artists as their inspiration. And the artist who's responsible for this picture is Steven Liu, my stepson.

[25:06]

And it's a beautiful picture. And this piece is really just a tribute to it. It's called The Bright World. Here will sit creamily on the edge of the world, blue and bluer still, the brown earth upon the wide sea. And I see me, and I see you, afloat upon the blue, the yellow disk in its own blue, coming and going to be true. Thank you. We promised each other to be very precise in timing the reading.

[26:21]

That's unbelievable. You were right to the second. I can't be that precise. Aw. Well, this is kind of a special occasion for me. It's always wonderful to come here to Zen Center and read. So I've gotten so much support from Zen Center and Berkeley Zendo over the years. OK. But on top of that, tonight I'm going to read for the first time from a work that I've been working on for around a year. and will probably be working on for several more years. And this is the first little tiny piece that's finished. And I worked extra hard to finish it so I could read it tonight.

[27:24]

And this is actually, there are many sections to this work, which is sort of a family history. One of the sections is called Shmuel. It was the patriarch of the family, Sam. And this is from the last chapter of Shmuel, and it's called A Train Through the Snow. There are five sections to this last chapter. I'm going to read sections one, four, and five. You have to use your imagination and fill in two and three. Something else I wanted to say. Now I can't remember what it was. Anyway, it takes place on the East Coast, mostly in New York, mostly in a hospital in New York, in the year 1964, which you learn very quickly.

[28:27]

I didn't have to say it. It's a train through the snow, one. This is now 79. This is now made. 15 years, so that would be made. 64, okay? So somewhere December or January 64, somewhere about that time, December or January 64, we had all gone to Dora's wedding in Rhode Island. We were at a wedding in Rhode Island, Dora Korenbaum. getting married for the first time in her life was well in her 50s, and she made herself a wedding, a real wedding party. We all came horrendous, snowstorm, blizzard, so we all went up by train because we knew that we'd be running into weather. There were so many, and we thought it would be fun for all of us to go together on the train rather than take a fleet of cars up there, and that's what we did. We went up there by train, and the next day we went by train

[29:27]

We all went together. We had a good time. We always had, there always was, and we went to the wedding, and we had a lot of fun. And my father always drank too much at weddings and ate too much and danced too much, and he looked ashen, and everybody thought it was the overindulgence. My father had been at weddings in Rhode Island. He never drank in between. He would have like a little half inch of liquor before dinner and a little glass very often, very often. That was it. But he, at social functions, he was drunk like in 20 minutes and dancing and laughing and he was just, he always had the best everybody in the world. He had never been sick, excepting that when he got, when he drank a lot at a wed, at a party, which he was inclined to do, he would blanch. And if I was around, I'd make him cut it out. You know Joe good naturedly and he'd always do when I was around because We got along very well. He and I, we never had a crossword. In all the years I've known him, he was gone.

[30:30]

Nobody could find him. There were searches being conducted for him. It was at a hotel in Providence, in a car, sleeping it off. He had gotten into a parked car, and there he was. But this wasn't known until people began to go home. Nobody, no one looked in cars, looked like he had drank too much and was getting sick. So there was a very heavy snowfall. And after the wedding, we made our way to the train, and all of the planes had been canceled. No planes were going. and the next day, there was this horrendous snowstorm, and all of the trains were delayed, and they were held up, and so on, so from Providence, from Boston, where the train came from, it arrived in Providence, jammed, not only not a seat, but hardly standing room to the rafters, but you either took that train, or there was no other way of getting, this train came through that was jammed, getting home, train coming down from somewhere else, from the bowels of Rhode Island or New England, coming down to New York, and The train was jammed with people. We had to stand, Providence to New York, and we were all standing.

[31:35]

And Sam was standing next to me. And there was a guy from Penn, incidentally. I can't remember who he was. greeted us warmly and he told us that he was a friend of yours. He had met us or something in a seat who was sitting and never even offered either Ida or Sam. Amazing. Anyhow, Sam was standing next to me and he was absolutely, he was white as a ghost. I have never seen so totally white. He was totally bereft of color. But in any case, He, he, he, Zadie looked absolutely ashen, very, but he was still feeling in a great mood and he organized a strange color, a community sing on the train and he gave people parts and he conducted and he had everybody singing and laughing and there was a guy on a very elderly man who got off at Stanford, Connecticut, that embraced him warmly. He gave him his card. It turned out he was a judge. He needed any legal help or anything. He should feel free. A Scotch name he had, he should feel free to call on him. He was well known to the entire train before we got home.

[32:38]

He and I knew that, well, he hadn't been drinking or anything like that the day after the wedding, and I knew when I looked at him. I was standing next to him. We were joking and kibitzing as we always did, He and I, and I knew that he really wasn't well. And I knew, well, I knew he wasn't well. I had no idea, of course, how sick he was. I just knew he looked very, very bad. We were coming home on a milk train from Rhode Island to New York, one of these slow trains that stopped everywhere. It was jammed to the hilt, and there were no seats around. And I happened to look at him, and he looked white as a sheet. And I realized it wasn't the alcohol. He just looked bad. He'd been there for three months. We'd been there every day. The day before he died, the four of us were probably just suffering from exhaustion, said that it was crazy.

[33:40]

Let's divide in half. Two of us come early, two of us come late, and that was it. He was he. I was with him in the morning. One of the doctors came in to him. One of the doctors came in to him, tell me the date today, Sam. And he grinned at me. He said, I know all my daughter's numbers. And he rattled them off, names and addresses. Then he said, and the date is he gave the date. And he said, 1947. My heart went, but this guy didn't say a word. He said, OK, Sam. And he left the room. And I never understood what 1947 was or why. But they were watching for, I mean, they had reason. to know that when the mind was affected, which didn't, which was the only sign of it, though, but that was the day that he died, in that night. And in the morning, he was still to that point in the morning, he was coherent and alert. Ida had spent the night here with us. We had, I had taken her home from the hospital here, and we came back.

[34:41]

She and I, he, he did what he often did. He said to her, don't rush back. I'm fine. You just rest in the morning. But when we got there at 9.30, he looked at her and he said, where were you? It was like, it was like he'd been alone so long. And in the afternoon, he didn't seem, he seemed to be sleeping more than usual. And he was, he said that he was having this pain in his back, which was a bone pain. And he said, oh, it's, he came in the doctor and he gave me this. He left my back uncovered and I caught a draft and, and it's, it's his fault. I have this, all this pain. It's just, and we mother fuckers. I took, I bought my mother home to Coney Island. She wanted to go. And Marilyn came. Beatty came. The evening shift. And I was left with Beatty. The day he died, Bubby had just left. And Charlotte. And Stell. And Bea and I stayed on. And I sent something. Said something that was not coherent. Became very frightened. And I called the intern in. I don't remember what he said to make me feel worried.

[35:44]

I had asked him something and he answered strangely. And the intern came in and started asking, what year is this? What's your name? And then he said, what year is this? And he said, 1948. One or two other questions. He answered some right and some wrong. To me, he either was into a coma or questioned. He answered them all even, even, asking himself and answering questions that the doctor hadn't even asked until he, when he gave his birthday, he gave something like 1849. And Marilyn did a double take, and he just kept on being sensible with other. But that she remembers feeling something very strange when he said that. Stell, for some reason, couldn't come that day. Said, what are you pestering me all day for? And I said, what's my name, Pop? He looked at me, and he said, Johnny. I started to giggle. And then I turned around to him again. He didn't say anything else. And then I looked around at him again. He didn't say anything else. johnny and then later he said b in the course of conversation anyway i spoke with dr good that afternoon he had gone into he was beginning to be comatose that afternoon the afternoon of the he was beginning to be comatose he was in and out they didn't quite that he was going to make it through the night the reason was that they had done a spinal pap that afternoon and

[37:07]

Blood had appeared in the fluid in pulling out the spinal path and suddenly he wasn't having any conversations. He said he was tired and so it was seven o'clock and the hours were over and Marilyn and Bea went downstairs and Marilyn and I got downstairs. I looked at Marilyn. She looked at me and we both turned around and ran back. We didn't say a word. We made a race for my father's room, and he was shaking his hands and his feet, and I screamed to her to get help. I was holding on to him. I said, what's my name, Pop? And he wasn't talking anymore. And of course I was crying. I was saying, Papa, talk to me, and he's not talking. His and his hands were just whole body in wheel while Marilyn was getting the doctor. He was principal of Levittown, principal of the high school in Levittown. He was in a remission. He died Not much after he wheeled himself in and he looked and he, he, he, these two men had been best friends and our best friends. He said, it's all right, B. He said, it's going to end.

[38:08]

And I started to scream, don't you dare to talk to me like that. And he wheeled himself out of the room. I was still hanging on to my father. I mean the whole body, the hands and the feet. And then Marilyn came back and she was also hanging on. And that was the beginning of the coma, and we called, and this principal never left our side. We called Charlie on the island to go to Coney Island to get Bubby, who we figured was home. By this time, called Charlotte. We called Stell. By the time I got home. back up here just 10 minutes after I was in the house the phone rang it was B she said that he was in a coma so we went down I don't know why but Eli and I had had a fight it was taking its toll on Eli so that every Sunday every time he was home he was he had the three kids and I had arranged with my sisters so that your mother and I would come early the other two came late when, when we left, we would leave when they came in. And Eli was taking the kids to the beach. A beautiful day, not a swimming day, but just to take the kids to the beach.

[39:13]

And my whole day revolved around the hospital. That's all I ever did. Just do the things you have to do so then you can go. I made them breakfast and I made them lunch and he was angry with me. I thought for going to the hospital so much. That's what I thought. I'm sure that's not what he was angry with. Or he might have said that you're neglecting the kids so much you should spend some time with them. He might have said one of those dumb things at the time, maybe angry about something else. Instead, maybe he said that to me, but when I went to the hospital we visited, he slept a lot that day. That day, Zadie slept a lot, and then Bea and Marilyn came, and when I came home, there was nobody here. Eli was still out with the kids. I fell asleep on the couch, and Eli came in, and now I was angry. I'd been home all these hours, and he wasn't, and this was what he wanted. He wanted me to be home. Now I was, And he never thought to come home with the kids or anything. I could have been with all these hours. And now it was just time for them to go to bed almost. And then the phone rang.

[40:15]

It was Marilyn. She said, you better get back here. At the time we had a maid. When I went to the hospital that day, I took her with me. She knew my father. My father, she, her name was Jane Janie. My father used to call her Johnny. And when I, we walked in, he said, hello, Johnny, which is one of the last things he said. Then fell asleep. So when I came to visit him, he was barely speaking. But he'd been well up to that last week, always speaking. So I made phone calls to everyone and they came running back. And we all sat in this little room outside his room. took turns going into his room. I was very frightened. I was frightened to go into the room. So Sidney would describe it for me. He went in and All of the husbands were there then. I think we all felt the same way. We're all scared. We're just waiting, and we were scared of it, scared of the whole act. We didn't know how it would end, and they let us stay in some little... There were... Visitors weren't allowed to be there, but we stayed there.

[41:16]

When we finally got there, all of us at that time of night And Charlie went and got mom and brought her to the hospital. And we were all in that room. They would let two of us go in and be at his bedside. He just looked so calm and sleeping. But meanwhile, we all feel the feeling of that night, three or four in the morning. We each got to go in one more time. That was the last. Then when Marilyn called me, she said, please help Sidney out. He had three kids. My maid came home. We drove the maid over to Sidney. Meanwhile, Charlie had been sent. Charlie had been sent to get my mother. Bea and Marilyn were the only ones there. I had driven my mother home. And then come here. So I called Charlie. He was sent to get my mother. I went to get Sidney to drop the maid off so Sidney could come. Because Marilyn had said, everybody better get there. There was no discussion. We just knew it was big trouble. When we got on the expressway with Sidney in the car, you've heard of Sunday traffic.

[42:17]

Well, Eli drove like a maniac. He went on the sidewalks. And within an hour and a half, everyone was there. but up until they came, it wasn't my father anymore. He got very small, and all you could see was the shaking they gave him. They kept him on the life machines. All the life machines were on him. Then when Uncle Charlie brought Bubby there, the principal was in the room with us, and we were both holding on to Zadie, and then they made us go out, and they carried in a big armchair for bubby and put it next to zady's bed and all and we and they and they put us in a doctor's office on the floor and they brought in a bunch of i've never seen nowhere they brought chairs so that we all had seat and allowed us to go back and forth and Bubby sat in there. It was toward morning, like 4 or 5 o'clock. She never left. The same thing I remember her saying, the very same thing as she said when he was in the Coney Island Hospital, that car crash, don't leave me, Sam. She sat there quietly holding on to him while he was shaking his hands, and all the way through that was the coma that he was in, and it was that quick, was even that from evening on to morning was too long.

[43:29]

You didn't see Sam anymore. So we flew to the city that visiting hours now, of course, were long since over. Staff there, we had developed through the months, we had developed most unusual, most incredible rapport with the staff where they all knew us. Well into the night, we were the only people there, the only visitors, provided we agreed to be quiet and so on. So we would go in and see him, and of course he was. He was in a coma now. Some intern came in and did one more spinal tap, and I was there. The final spinal tap, he pulled the thing out, pulled the needle out. Syringe was red. It was completely full of blood. Not the intern. He was a resident. He turned around to me. He knew me. He said, look, why don't you go home? It's, I don't know. To this day, I was just too frightened to. I didn't go in. No, no, no. He was bleeding. Then also he was in, bleeding internally, and they had him propped up. It was just I was not with him, but I was concerned that someone should be with him when we got there.

[44:33]

He was just breathing very heavily, and he was sleeping, and that's all he ever did. Then he, Charlotte came, and my mother came last with Charlie, and I was alone with him in that room, and I didn't know what, but I just felt that if I helped him breathe, he would wake up. They had already told us he was in a coma. But I didn't know what that meant either. So I heard of people coming out of comas. Coma wasn't final. Cancer wasn't final. People have remission. Leukemia never accepted what anyone told me. Things always change. Alone with him in the room, I knew I said that if I could help him breathe, he'd come out of it. And I was helping him breathe mouth to mouth. He never did. And I was always afraid of hearing that last breath. And I heard it. It was just what they said it was. It's a rattle. It's a... Yeah. Well, normally, the great talent, the last time I heard him read was about two years ago in Casa Hara.

[45:35]

We've been trying to figure out how to get a little poetry reading together at Casa Hara so the tournament could read stuff out loud, but he'd written it, uh, and so that everybody else wouldn't bring zillions of poems out and read. So we couldn't figure out how to do that, and I had to get all past the staff and everything. So finally, one day at a work meeting, the government just announced, they said, tonight at 7.30, I'm going to go into David Schneider's room and read poems, and anybody who wants to come can come. And that was the last time I heard it, and it was great. And I know it's still great now, so you can be used to that. Thank you. Well, my planet is not in great development. So I'd like to present this book, which I like very much. Susan made a nice job. She produced it and covers very nice and so forth.

[46:35]

So I'd like to present a little bit about this book, but then also some new work. So this book is called Like a Walk Through a Park. And is my voice loud enough? And so I always had the idea that if you ever were fortunate enough to have a book published, you should write a preface to it. So I did. And it says, preface, whether or not there is really anything in the world, including myself, I don't know. Sometimes it seems so many things are appearing, everything is literally happening at once. So many movements, schemes, projects, all the lovely tiny details, flower books, cooking and eating, the way the trees or streets look in the rain, the people and all their complications, governments, disasters, deaths. These are the nights I can't get soon to sleep for all I imagine there is to do or see, think or feel. Other time, nothing. Transparent. At peace. But I do know of a shining stream of speech, the sound going very deep,

[47:40]

in which the world is definitely made to be something very solid I can touch and feel for. This work is a record of that place where you can really meet things. If you do not believe it, I think you will have to take my word for it. And then signed by Nate Kasahara, November 12, 1979. So then what it is, it's a kind of diary of different things that I was thinking or writing down or experiencing during the months of March and April of 1977 when I was living at 340 Pace Street. So I'll just read a little bit of it just to give you, it's pretty various, but just to give you the idea of what it's like. There's one part which is called Ralph said, and I'll read that part. And this has to do with the little story behind it is that this friend of mine, Ralph, we used to have an ice cream store. And I was working nearby, and I would go visit in his ice cream store. And he told me that he was writing all about his family in Russia.

[48:41]

So this is what Ralph said. I felt if I wrote about the Jewish question, I'd sort of made it up most of them. I felt if I wrote about the Jewish question, once and for all, I could be done with it. I tried to reconstruct the life of my grandfather, Chaim Pinsk of Minsk, and his wife, and their children, and Rachel, as they wandered en masse across Eastern Europe with witchcraft, the pogroms, and the first early stirring of pre-World War I modernism as historical backdrop. I didn't know it was so funny. I had vague stirrings, racial memories, faint echoes of that time. The trees, all without leaves, blasted in gray, or else with leaves, would have a washed-out, ruddy-tinted shade of green, such as the pictures of the Flemish masters before Van Gogh suggest. Everything distant, fearsome, not to be touched. The brain alone, classical, educated, far above it all.

[49:43]

And the Minsks, simple people, their boots always muddy, their clothes... somber-colored and shabby. They lived at the beginning of the story in a shtetl, houses made practically of mud and bricks, goats everywhere eating your shoes. Everyone tried to cheat everyone out of anything. Long periods of depressing quiet under a steel gray sky punctuated by loud shouting, horse croaking, balls of fists of washerwomen and babushkas bent over into each other's rough faces shrieking as the wind blew. Only the great learning of the rabbis saved the day, kept the order always intact, and it was they who unfailingly showed the way. They were men of unimagined dignity, patience, and endurance. Men who spent all their waking hours engrossed in studying and contemplation, bearded with fine hands, long unkempt hair, prayer shawls who walked the poor half-flooded mud-paved byways of the shtetl with their eyes blazed, seeing visions as they mumbled prayers and incantations from the Kabbalah while fingering the princess of their tzitzit. It was in this environment that Thayin and Fagulaminsk, or Pinsk, had their children. offering Strauss, Linata, Mendel, Heinrich, Jacob, and Rachel one by one with a screen in the shot.

[50:50]

It was woefully crowded in their tiny abode. Their children were lost at birth, two more miscarried. The graves were in the community cemetery. The seasons marched by one by one. In the spring, the feast of Passover, when all opened up, the brain stood at attention, the body took in deep draughts of air. And the Torah, as the season turned to fall and after the high holy days had passed in solemnity and fearful contrition, came the great parade of simplest Torah when the scrolls themselves in blue and gold brocade and velvet with silver pointers in the shape of the finger of God or the archangel Gabriel were carrying day protection all about the town. The Torah, the Torah, the wonderful book, she who came to them with the dust on Friday night, dressed always in white, came softly on a zipper in that season to make of all lives a prayer and a sigh, the feminine, the glorious, exact law of God. Then came the pogrom. The Cossacks thundered into the village on sweating, muscular horses smelling of vodka and unclean heat. Their eyes were small and yellow, and they whipped the horses to a foam and swung their crude lances, breaking windows and knocking down chimneys with pagan abandon.

[51:56]

The quagmire life of Fayim and Faygal at that moment came to an end. Faygal was raped by the Cossacks 17 times before the eyes of Fayim and the children. Time was choked with a bitter rage. He spat at the wind, the sky. These men, with their unspeakable horses and tow heads, were all that the Lord had retrieved, unclean and unfit. He wandered to Western Europe, where he joined a band of white Russian revolutionists. He returned to Pinst and assassinated the mayor. He assassinated the czar. He became later a famous Cubist painter and then a bomb expert in World War I. Abraham, Strauss, Menachem, Mendel, and Rachel had been murdered by the Cossacks. Jaime and Jacob left France for the United States, where they started a movie company in Hollywood. Wagner grew old and died. Jaime gave up painting. He settled in the Holy Land. The hot breeze has settled his brains after a period of years. He grew tan, pale, voluminous. He worked on the terrorist question, the question of Africa, world trade, money, irrigation, machinery, landholding, music, survival. He no longer grieved over the loss of his wife or his children or his brothers and sisters at the hands of the Nazis.

[52:59]

About this, there was no need of bitterness now. It was God's way. The climate of the desert was ideal for him. It aided his breathing immeasurably on a clear day in the summer before the great density of heat arose. One could climb to the top of the Mount of Olives and see Eretz Israel stretching out in all directions one million miles. And then one was home for a breakfast of figs and bread before beginning the day at work. So all these parts are dated and are able to pen. It's called the Easter sign. So I'm touching all the bases. Easter sign. The Easter, because you never know. The Easter lily opens fully upon the worker basket of your heart. At this dark springtime's passion's flowering, what crucible annoyance alack? Cursing, pursuing, the garden steps alight, brick walls of our longing are believing. All are melancholy pensive, our hearts both dirtied, rock and strap.

[54:01]

The essential fragrance of hearts alighting upon the last tinted dark of your personal night. The Easter lily lends its fragrance. The garden opens to a sigh. April 11th, excerpt. Peering out, I observe the various particulars. From these, I abstract generalities. From these generalities, I extract the universal rule. These rules suggest my values. By this process, even though I am a man, I act like a tree. And then I'll read the last word in here. since it's a close to home one. It's written downstairs, I think, in the reading room. April 17. It is a question whether or not we know the answer to whether or not lined streets with houses, dogs, anyone's state officially held help. Can't ever remember the question whether or not. It is the answer we expect of the music we wish to hear.

[55:03]

The sound of the dong, bong, lays upon a pipe, my mind's eyes flunking on the preposition of your heart. It is a question whose answer has not arisen. The great mystery we awake to is last night's lie. I walked with you in the city. Were you walking? contending error of all calamity and despair, fostered latent beams of total delight in the breadbox the question all questions considered, only life itself the remedy for it and more of it every day. And where would you be without all your aches and pains, headaches, bruises, ashtrays? They made you know you're alive. The question is, as the question conceives itself nothing, any lack of contention can't confine I wonder about that, the latter way it was, the day it was, the tree, the bee, the breeze. I want to be full of it every day in every way. It's black, black. The after-rays appeared to me in a densely packed pot of smoke. Remarked on such possibilities, I remained faithful to yours. Excuse me, I find the scratching of your pen unbearable.

[56:08]

I don't like to seem too forceful, but would you mind removing yourself to another room? Were it only for myself, I would not say so. But the other six seem to agree as well. We are all trying to read complicated Buddhist Abhidharma texts of the 8th century in Pali. It is very difficult to do so while your pen is making such a racket. We feel our work is significant socially, politically, personally, and religiously. Besides, we are not paid for it, which gives it virtue. Sounds like Henny Young. And there are six of us. And the room has been designated to our purpose. Because of seven hours of meditation per day, we are extremely sensitive to subtle sounds, such as the sound of a pen scratching paper. Any such sound so subtle will be apprehended by us, such as the rustling of paper you have just commenced.

[57:12]

There must be other places you can't complete your poem. More suitable to it, I am sure to agree. So that's that. I wanted to also read some new works. I'm trying to work on some poems, like this one here that says Nagarjuna, this poem called Nagarjuna. It's very strange that no things are the same. And then... I have another Zen poem because my friend Robert Harris is here, so this is a sonnet, and the sonnet is about Case 18. And it says... Beneath the shadowless tree the community ferryboat seems to shove off into a distance. There go the trees.

[58:18]

Shapes the emperor, and he has to ask, After you die, what will you need? And he answers, One day I was walking past the opera house with my dear old friend Robert Harris, and I noticed all the people in cars were sliding by as though they weren't moving. I swept my arm across the pallet of the day. Later on, if you don't understand my words, you should ask my disciple. So you can't laugh because the sonnet has to be going continuously. And if what was made the imaginary prisoners, he should ask for more torque, then you'll know the score. Otherwise, meals on an airplane will seem dead to you. And then I have this poem called On Thinking. And after you die, what then? Somewhat or only more of the same? Spring has come. Spring is here. What profits these boots, this beauty? So when a man laughs, his sleeves shake like bamboo leaves in a cold hill's fold.

[59:23]

not as you'd imagine. Hence, thinking takes the form of plans and schemes in which you are a central stage to grand designs of projected events passing and their concomitant consequences. Yet you worry, and that is why thought churns wheels through all those difficult passages. Somebody else's words tick. I want to find my coat since the party's over, but it is not necessary to fill out a form. Other times, thinking chases itself like old foxes. Beats of sweat appear upon the brow because you can't remember the color of your baby blanket. But as such can be free of thought or free for thought, either one. Thought is in and of the body, that is sure. And thought is a tender one, more and more, the book which is pulling away. Thought grows to go out from the body to stir all buds to make a spring, mentioned above. As a line of trees first silent locks the world and then by thought is caused to stir, unwinding, a strand the morning hurls to frown. And this poem is called The Moral.

[60:25]

These lines are written in a hurry at a bus stop waiting for a green bus. I can sit on this orange bench because I can take my stand nowhere. Some people can have great courage because things really get to them. Other people laugh and are continuously unaffected. Other people are poets, but I... can sit on this orange bench and take my stand nowhere. Nothing ever gets through to me or done. Everything gets undone and is fun. Some people call it ruthless. Some people call it dumb. And what about pumping out the septic tanks in the stream? Yesterday, Kathy told me the grim story of the one they call Agent Orange. You are reading this, but actually, a lot of people are really dying. And what are you or me doing? This is written in my room. I was lying. This is a poem called The Law. I'm in a serious phase. The moral and the law, and I'm thinking, the law. But are the steps not determined by the illness, the sensations, not the descriptions?

[61:28]

And whatever you include in thinking, also in the middle of a train of thought, say it was a picture of Nora's sensation like hot. Can't you observe yourself and say, who is doing this measuring? You expected this, and that surprised you. What kind of a mistake was it? And is our confidence justified? What would better relate to us than success, such as if you say, fire has always burned me. Are you just rounding things off? It could possibly remain in the air and not fall. Then he will see the light. It will dawn on him that, aha, now I had it. But will he be able to go on after that? Because, for instance, where else might he get to so suddenly? A gesture of resignation. All right then, why not suppose thinking is always in a language, and the rules are sometimes in a syntax, and the expression is tending toward a technique of a concept in a tradition? Then you have to be too slight. After all, it won't do to make a false move. And what about memory and expressions like a smile?

[62:29]

Either you have this experience or you don't. To quote the law of the excluded middle. February 14. Valentine's Day, I'm riding, sitting at this rude vibes bar, everyone half lit and delighted, drinking an obligatory beer while waiting for the bus. The third one today that will take me to Carmel Valley Village where Annette will get me and take me to Janesburg where I'll take the Toyota into Tassajara to see you and Aaron and Noah after my very busy city trip. March 14th. This last week, the surly sullen bell pealed through Canyonvale in silence. No verse formed nor worn, words necessarily washed over me. Ah, the spirit of self-examination, a lock. Less torch is a murmur, and no mead is a still, still bath. The pitcher pill. I was just sitting there minding my own business when I remembered some of the times when women made me mad.

[63:32]

Old Joyce Miller really could get me going. Once I broke my little finger on the men's room wall over something she did. Once I broke down her door only to burst into the room, overturning the kitchen table at which sat her mother, father, a neighbor, and a child from VMI because she insisted on going to the senior prom with one of the evidence points who had a tick, which she did. Once I smoked an entire pack of candles in her presence out of spite, though I wasn't a smoker. All these things only amused her. Perhaps that was why she liked me and pursued me even after our romance was really over when I drove her far out into the dark countryside to do something nastily spiteful to her in the rain. Remembering all of this in the flash of a moment, as one does, unfortunately didn't help. But it didn't hurt either. March 18th. Six-sempered Pyranus, I cry, swinging my sword. The devil take you and away.

[64:40]

I may be awake, but I'm angry. One last face may be the last face I have, but I have seemingly boneless, all kinds of faces. One is more blue or boneless than the last face, that is, but it's nothing I feel like discussing just now, I said. Well, that felt better. I can only be a real prophet once. This vision here. This vision here. Will it necessarily ruin my chance for love? Months and months and hours of days. My needs, they are simple, but the times they are changing needn't be crucial. Something's more or less going on out there. It must be efficient. Everything is. Also in the mind is. This kind of thing has happened before and will again. Listen. And where once there was only a tiny, gnawing unrest, Now there's a real pain there, a silent one too, which is the worst kind. These doorways are horrid. Now history is only a personal doorway like a church. Of course, you can explain everything, but that won't make it stick. This time around, if you memorize the plan, if the feeling you can't hear, there's a lot of iffy, very iffy at stake.

[65:48]

He doesn't know anything about calmness. And now he is thinking, you have to own the whole game. which is true, but someone is out behind the park right now, torturing the bushes. Ah, it's no use. Clouds. A slip of cloud comes black overhead, otherwise the sky is blue, filling all the corners, and a flat cloud caused by winds now widens. There is a feeling of solidarity with the waning moon. Some clouds are like thin bands strewn across the sky, the sky's hair combed with clouds. And these clouds make mist, fades away, bunch up into animal shapes, and disappear behind a peak. Yet the sky is often all cloud, white and gray, moving with forcefulness in a twisted wind. And these days make an arrangement of souls, followed by nights of sleeplessness.

[66:50]

Clouds, like dark munitions, bank against nighttime skies, and while people are sleeping in beds of cloud, pile up dread and musty sky air in packs. These clouds have completely their effect prior to sunrise. Often clouds in the west have the effect of coming into view in the east as purple ones. People look at purple clouds as though they might be camel-colored clouds, yet they're not. Whole areas of clouds have come under cultivation in recent years. So fine and subtle, they are indivisible clouds and cause the blue sky to be secretly stormy and blissful and self-confidently obtuse. Enigmatic are the clouds. Summer floats early afternoons. They move and shift occasional weathering desires. These clouds actually do walk up to secret heavens where angels catch them. and fry them to some delightful purpose. The clouds have white eyes and dried teeth, so fluffy in a dazzling sky above many birds in spring flight, and cleave voluptuous, madly swaying, merging in new formations, terrible methods.

[68:06]

Then, this is a short section, a long work in paragraphs and sentences called On Whether or Not to Believe in Your Mind. And it goes on and on, and it sort of needs to be fixed, so I don't have the whole thing done. There's one little section I think is kind of dumb. Dogen's last word. Dogen's last words were, For 52 years, I've hung the sky with stars. Now I crash through. What a shattering. I remember several of us, maybe Barry and Kit, maybe Ron, too, and I, and Kathy, it was probably Nancy, went to Land's End, if that is the name of the place I am talking about, in San Francisco, one of the places one would go to in San Francisco. Behind or nearby, the fake sandstone cliffs, that may have been a different place on another occasion. And we were on a kind of boardwalk, looking at the blue sea, working the rocks near the shore. I remember there were a good many gulls, white against the blue of sky and sea, and tourists.

[69:23]

It must have been a Sunday afternoon, and the tourists' children. We put a quarter in one of the telescopes, fastened to the middle railing so as to get a better look at the scene, the pelicans swooping. There may also have been some seals on a rock widened with gold droppings and shining goldish in the coldish sun. Everything looked greasy and unreal because of the black tube. Barry wanted to go into the little house with the dish telescope in it. It was darker in there. I don't know what kind of telescope it was. Maybe it was a bathyscope or a heliotrope or a stethoscope. But in any case, we and a few tourists and their children were in there. And you move some handle and saw it projected on the wall or on the large dish itself in the center of the little room, maybe on the ceiling, a blue shining scene that was outside. It looked like a movie, the waters shimmering and moving the gulls. Somehow you could move the handle and see another. section of the view. I remember we discussed this, especially Barry, who liked it a lot. It is just the type of thing he really likes.

[70:24]

Then we went back outside, and all of us leaning on the railing, looking at the sea, I told them Dogan's last words. I remember it made me very happy to tell them, but everyone else seemed pretty uncomfortable. I didn't remember, and I wanted to read this other poem. because this is a happy birthday poem. I developed this plan, I guess, of February the 24th is Kathy, my wife's, birthday. And also, two friends of hers and mine also have their birthday on the same day. So I developed the idea that on that day every year, I would write them all a poem. However, this poem has nothing to do with that. You get to see the poem written on Anna Lou's birthday. Why didn't you find it?

[71:30]

Jack in the Box. You kids don't know how those cows sweated over those burgers. This is the one I talked about. Oh, here it is. Happy birthday, Alan Lee. kerosene lamps on the table very peaceful rendition of someone's dream time nothing matters but this heaven matters all the shining little stars whizzing overhead now my life anymore can't even say it matters it's gone ha funny oak table I saw the stars can't I now Because the stars must be now, as I write, the stars must be now as real as thinking. Wondered. So in the same way, it must be a pure, it must be purer than the kind of life, the real kind of life that always stays. I can also say hello to you in this shining stream of speech, and it won't be a mess, and it won't be a fake. November 10th. Happy birthday, Alan Lewis.

[72:33]

In conclusion, like I said, I thought I would give the news report from Tassajara. You shouldn't understand this to be actual literary work, just a news report from Tassajara, because I know a lot of you know Tassajara, and I want you to know what's going on there. I've been taking careful notes. This was written a couple days ago at the pool, where I seem to spend a great deal of time. So this is just the news, what's happening at Tassajara, at the pool. Mid-afternoon at the pool, now filling up with cold stream water. Some pieces of dried sycamore leaves float on the water's surface. As I write, I can hear burble of water flowing into pool from intake valve. This, the south side from the pool in the shade. Hot today, about 110 degrees. Lately, hot days make people dizzy. They go jump in pool, fully clothed, walk around all day drippy. Lazy day, lunch by creek, accompanied by excited, screaming children, quote-unquote, swimming. I'm leaving in five minutes.

[73:38]

Bye-bye. At the pool. No lifeguard. Trash. Hazy ripple waters. This morning, floating cloud ribbons adorned peaks. This was his body, but what body? So supposedly it was the same one as before. He remembered that, but then what about the human voices? It was even worse than the faces. Many kinds of material, then some methods worked. Even in Berkeley, we used to pick them up. Meanwhile, as a man was swimming, it was cultivated. Black line around edge of pool painted blue. Steep hill, maple, oak, old, rock on top. White lines on blue steps near black railing. White woman on redwood chair. Bald woman in... black bathing suit, only here. Only here, man in white sailor's cap, shirtless sandals.

[74:45]

Here occasioned many strokes of nameless sunshine imagining I wonder now, out loud, no longing, so no growing older. My teeth, his teeth, those are more yellow than before, so I say he is older. That man must be then in previous years. You better believe it. I don't. This is yet another stanza, mentioning the old man, John Harris, who's got every right in every world to die as he fixes himself, this self by a blue pool to do today. Keith's kick. It's a kick back. Thunders through the pool. Mary's pale blue bathing suit. Holy shit, did you know all these bodies, Keith can make them ooze out light? Here comes Ann in a midnight black bathing suit in the water in the pool.

[75:50]

Uh-oh. And it, likewise, has got the black, stretchy suit scudding along surface. Yellow grass on hillside is dead yellow grass dried due to blistery sun, mostly the time alone or year. Length of days, waves, dried grass. The sun just does what the sun does do. The same as me, I think. Blanchard's bathing suit gets purple piping. I'm so ecstatic over the new desert brown shoe. Too bad it's too hot for wearing these ones, seeing in mind the real photo on the pile of other such in the kitchen, far away from where the medium billed normal monk sits beside the bubbling pool. Someone reading Tolstoy. I used to tell all people read Tolstoy's, not me. Now I think it is better. Meeting me, who is alive, breathing air of your age also.

[76:57]

Tolstoy, not. Not yet. Cause and effect are clear. This person I am made to be unavoidably touches base. Things I do, done again, can't make anything other than this out of purposeless extensions. Women, amazingly. have breasts that wave when they move by the pool.

[77:25]

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