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CLAUDINE: (covers her face, emotionally exhausted) I’m old.

LILY: (I feel old.)

CLAUDINE: Bonnie has four kids //

SHELLY: (Three) //

CLAUDINE: and she’s two years younger than me I’m gonna be twenny.

LILY: If I met someone you will.

CLAUDINE: But you’re pretty.

LILY: You’re stunning!

CLAUDINE: I’M FAT!

It was true that Eva’s male colleagues had by now ceased to joke among themselves that a hopeless crush on Professor Mueller ought to be included among the requirements for the major in philosophy, but this was not because the students no longer fell in love with her. They did, at a rate which had of course slackened over the years but was still not inconsiderable. It was an irony—of course quite lost on Eva, who was steadfastly oblivious to the dramas in which she figured—that many who sat raptly listening to their professor’s lectures on the “futility of the passions,” on the need to transform the passive emotions directed towards objects and people outside ourselves into the active emotions of the intellect, were swollen with an advanced case of that same passive desire whose elimination was being eloquently, even passionately, urged upon them.

On the way home, going,

with the hill & mammoth clouds

behind me, rushing to the house

before the rain, those beautiful Pakistani girls,

their faces happy as poppies, I thought, those girls

rushing home as I was rushing home

to beat the first small pieces

of rain falling down

like nickels in departing light. There

was the laughing of the beautiful girls,

shrieking gulls, five or six of them (depending

on whether I count myself), the bright

& shining planets of their dresses

lifting, just so, in the wind. & their black hairs.

& the black sound of horses, horses

hoofing it home, the click

& clop of their patent leather hooves—Still, it touches

my ear, this sound. I touch

my heart. I can’t stop touching

my heart & saying, Today is my birthday,

you see? For the beautiful clamor of planets

dressed as girls who, running home, have heads.

Whose heads swing black night, running home

on the black feet of horses, from the rain.

Now I understand. Today is my birthday.

It is Thursday, my day. My black day.

Things weather fast here, soon bird will be bone,

brittle and white, dead twig snapped underfoot

where the sky alters in seconds, shine to shower,

and harsher truths hit home hour after hour –

the sundew snagging flies, settling to eat,

a fat gull’s fractured keen that cuts through stone.

BEDER: (fuming) Independence Day fireworks. How can the Israelis call it Independence Day and not choke on the words? They celebrate forcibly removing people from their homes? Killing men, women, children? This is cause for a party?

ADHAM: Let’s not get political.

BEDER: Who’s getting political?

I've lurked in chat rooms with discussion threads devoted to such subjects as “A previously unknown Albert Goodell brace found in the wild.” One sweltering summer morning, on the Jay County fairgrounds in the farming village of Portland, Indiana, I walked among fabulous machines as small as schnauzers and as huge as elephants, all gleaming in the August sun. Drive belts whirred, flywheels revolved, pistons fired, and a forest of smokestacks piped foul smoke and rude music into the otherwise cloudless sky. Mostly, I have ridden a Midwestern circuit of flea markets and farm auctions in the passenger seat of an emerald green Toyota pickup truck piloted by a fifty-five-year-old botanist with a ponytail, spectacles like windowpanes, and a beard verging on the Whitmanesque.