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   l o a d e d

--- R O B E R T   K E N D A L L


The man with the gray hair and whitening sensibilities steps out into his friend's backyard after dinner. He looks over the familiar cessations in

the shrubbery and grass, the edgings and stipplings that arrest the migrant greens all up and down their routes from near-black to almost gold.

With beer in hand he examines once again the belongings he has stored there: an anchored calm, a weighted perspective, a certain translucence of mind that takes on the fastened colorations, his very examining come back to him

from its locker within the look of the place, a lens like no other that he turns upon his host to contemplate the belongings he has laid away in the younger man's agitated face.

As the cinctures of physiognomy around eyes and mouth adjust the apertures, let his friend out into the wilderness called personality, the stowed goods are evident from the bulges-- in the terrain, in the words, in what doesn't have to be said.

Under their coverings the goods bear the old man's name, not to secure the belongings but to secure those little plots of name.

As the older one listens gravely, the young man can feel him claiming his belongings-to: the proprietary sockets into which his listening fits, the attention-shaped berths. Clarity, ambitions, happiness come and go, the young man thinks, but this old friend remains driven firmly into the far edge of life, a stake to cinch the rope to. It's the resistance that's reassuring, the tension of the rope proving there's really something out there so far from the start, something to hold his inexplicable weight.

© crossconnect 1995-2000 |
published in association with the |
university of pennsylvania's kelly writers house |