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--- R O B E R T   K E N D A L L


Is it the charged geometry of buildings against sky? The urging rumble of traffic poured into walled air? What is it that hangs in the back of his mind like a cardboard sign proclaiming There's a Winner Every Time? What makes him cast himself each morning into the cluttered basin made of city, turns him into a toy fishhook attached to the downtown train line. Each afternoon he hauls himself back with a trinket in tow: another day like the others in its stapled plastic bag, another look at the world with eyes that weren't what he'd been hoping for. He's after the Big One. He's sure that each try is another number wedged under the fingernails of the equation. Eventually it will have to give. Every fisherman believes he can learn to read the water's surface. Nothing but verbs strewn like tea leaves-- the swirl, advance, recede, cleanse, dissolve, yield of the liquid corridors and cubicles and the desk where he feeds the acquisitions projections into his spreadsheet, trying to close the holes so nothing can slip through. The Big One. As each day draws to a close it's there like a sinking sun, unnoticed but coloring the entire landscape, perfectly lighting the clean, convincing lines of the handsome story walls built from its always getting away.

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