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Miss
You Already - Horning
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1.
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The
odd joke tied my respect to a shelf and jumped a
secondhand opinion of amiable angels consistent with
the three great joys of going in like an oeil de perdrix
and sparkling on a small scale after tormenting others
for a guilty conscience spread over half the century
and handed on with a good natured and rather lazy
contempt. Professing to desire only restricted hours,
these mice punish themselves and pass out exalted by
a blasphemous dodging, their suppressions unwound
and touched by sharp hands of which I had lost sight
in the long awaited rain of gracious paraphthegmata. |
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2.
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This
particular record lies blank in a cellarful of
agricultural leases, I believe, left there only to in-
sult a vast society of compurgators that survived
sitting up at night with thermometers ready on
the table before I broke up, either past my best
or having no good to translate without betraying
the harsh friends who told me that each day of
the glorious week spoils a wildflower so sweet
and complicated she never comes to a gunflint
finish, they guess because of her clouded body. |
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3.
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The
scorch and twang of their neighborhood receive
the sanction of a grin without solace, the single large
diamond slung on a loose gold chain swinging forward
and flashing as she bends to say that she has withered
appreciably since lunch, or was it dinner, call and she’ll
ask the waiter with a pretty taste for feminine names
and an actual Margaret. But he must pass with slight
notice, first thing in the morning and the last at night
inseparably blended, however much more he might
have done, cataracting our mistakes with satisfaction
to match each claret detail still black against the light. |
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4.
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I
found Sherry at a table outside a bar in the old
port, smoking, counting the Pall Malls left in her
pack, and still visibly upset by news of the crush
that was only a memory to me, or the suggestion
mentioned earlier, when I was accused and convicted
of listing. I had just returned my natural allegiance.
For 20 years the financial results were disastrous,
the amusement great, with differences never quite
proportionate and permutations and combinations
of experiment practically infinite, so to speak, and
the result tears that would mingle with shadows on
wired eyes, though I’ve heard nothing worse than
salad making recently, or cataloging all the rust in
a library while young girls play badminton below
the open windows, lovely as ever and thirstier too.
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5.
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Had
he missed an opportunity to be audacious and
profane, the tail of a comet that no one he knew
was likely to see the first time, much less see a-
gain, because he was far too busy picking up old
jars that suggest catastrophe, hard and dumb but
still seducing an apparent Gentile, or at least trans-
Jordanian, who tells him flat that it is practically
useless to open an antique store unless you select
prices parallel to those which obtained 30 years ago
without reproach of conscience, even by yourself
in a quiet way, and orders a small supply forthwith?
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6.
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The
palling character of her attractions precludes
favorite rivers and virtually forgotten fritillaries,
a general curse of sincerity, overreachingness, and
fraud attacking with particular ferocity the banks
of one river and the trout and grayling stopped in
shadows below a red and blue cloud the night before
stale boys could play chemistry with tapped throats,
he says, an orthodox experiment in eating and drinking
with one of the last of the falconers, great with fist
and scull, too, if we believe the transparent faking
consecrated by a baby lover staring at a Holiday
Inn as she imagines the innocence of a pontifical
smile that is neither vulgar nor West Indian but
warm in both directions under a thrall of names. |
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7.
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No
division past or present, actual or possible, ex-
cites the other light before war breaks out of a two
year sojourn in the north of a real privation adver-
tised in London as a personal fiend, who begs me
to mention again the final sale, so mispronounced
and highly dependent on tides for blue. It gets slimy,
he says, and for once I believe that he is not too old
or otherwise blessed with sour fondness for an un-
shaken belief that a millionaire and a miner’s wife
have more to say to each other than Quis separabit?
if given the chance; if, that is, they take the chance
brief, bright, and beatific, though the briefness is all
either is likely to remember, should they recall any-
thing that could mean so much, they’d like to think. |
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8.
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In
a certain sense, I do not envy anyone who was
an embrocation for reverential treatment without
personal reluctance open to abuse after a sickness
drier than anything but straw colored history and
another kind of friction to stay awake in a winter
that bore vines instead of stars during another war
signed off by the ready hand of a sympathetic at-
tendant, preferably feminine and nowhere spoken
against in scriptures of midnight, perhaps because
they do not exist or, if they do, have lost their punch
under hot water, regretting dark eyes that pleased
in a tantalizing vitrine, entirely reminiscent of gin,
not far from the tail end of a twice abused century. |
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9.
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Usually
his nerves need treatment (in a minor key)
for him to possess the almost intellectual as well as
sensual interest of an old no doubt rash statement
about a connection between sophomores startled by
French and at least one drugstore in a riverine town
where most mercenaries lean slightly on twilight,
venturing a quasibotanical note only when asked
by roadhouse keepers shaken by a black ice storm
that attacks the arcades and varnish while steel re-
mains stainless in Bayonne, a pleasing sight until
a flame runs up and scorches his arm the violet
east of a University Place long gone. He opens
the front door to join the torchlight procession
after her rough trip by water. No one else will. |
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10.
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We
had a basement to accommodate the better sort,
always having in another when we began on one
noble feature, with eggs and other foreign bodies
frothing as creamily at the second visit as at the
first exactly contrary experience, annotated in a
beautiful and scholarly hand but in a most virulent
spirit. Why can’t we call things by the plain names
for profligate conduct, mister full to the bung?
I detach my testimonial from the echoing wood
after two men fall headlong into a Chinese ditch
and then blame it on the trees, which are a slight
sorrow to darken the joy of a slit window from
which a boy and a girl hear someone in the street
cry out, A bible and a pillowcase for a penny, but
when one of the two rushes upstairs to secure a
bargain, the crier is far off and the child too late. |
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11. Zootje
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Willing
to omit hopefulness, either open or concealed
by an unusual variety of thankless backers, she moves
our calculus to an island where you can be blinded by
opposition to the impertinent foreign interference
that makes imitation of Christ and adoption of Paul
occasions for the toxic euphoria of mobled queens, what-
ever apokatastasis may bring about. It is good to
have walked 500 miles alone in 20 days and one pair
of boots, and it is good to see the secret of the sea
and the lessons of the land from Scilly to Skye to
lakes that lie. It may even be good to go downtown
and dance all night with the light of your life or, better,
to hear Placido Domingo flare through Lincoln Center
with Parsifal till you
feel you are drowned without
knowing that the half puzzled professor behind you
does as she likes and others do as they like, too, at a
ghostly brunch to which your fates were not invited.
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