“He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.”

“That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attemptedalthough married six months.Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not surewe got it right.He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.Early next dayI wrote a short talk ("On Defloration") which he stole and had publishedin a small quarterly magazine.Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.Or should I say ideal.Neither of us had ever seen Venice.”

“He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.”

“Free marks are a gesture of rage. One of the oldest myths we have of this gesture is the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of paradise. Why did Eve put a free mark on that apple? To say she was seduced by the snake or longing for absolute knowledge or in search of immortality are posterior analytics. Isn’t the simple fact of the matter that she was bored?”

“The fact that Anna is somewherehaving coffee or a dreamis an assault on me.I hate these moments of poverty.What does man eat? ask the phenomenologists.Like the dogs, names,down there,starving.”

“...Heracles was strangely silent. What is he thinking? / Geryon wondered. / Geryon watched prehistoric rocks move past the car and thought about thoughts. / Even when they were lovers / he had never known what Herakles was thinking. Once in a while he would say, / Penny for your thoughts! / and it always turned out to be some odd thing like a bumper sticker or a dish / he'd eaten in a Chinese restaurant years ago. / What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them / developed a dangerous cloud.”

“fr. 2All We as Leaves He (following Homer) compares man's life with the leaves.All we as leaves in the shock of it: spring-one dull gold bounce and you're there. You see the sun? - I built that.As a lad. The Fates lashing their tails in a corner. But (let me think) wasn't it a hotel in Chicago where I had the first of those - my body walking out of the room bent on some deadly errandand me up on the ceiling just sort of fading out- brainsex paintings I used to call them?In the days when I (so to speak) painted. Rememberthat oddly wonderful chocolate we got in East (as it was then) Berlin?”