How Fish Learn to Drown
        It was high school, and there was she, and there was me, and there was she standing before my desk, her bosom wrapped in baby blue fabric, leaning, leaning into my desk, and I was all a-fluster, scarcely daring to breathe, the schism forming in my mind, the one that made my life divisiblepre-Katherine, post-Katherineand her lips parted, like the way roses bloom suddenly before you look, and she said to me that she wanted to say, that she just wanted to say, that she didnt know how to say this, but that she loved the way I spoke, and wrote, and sang, and maybe even thought, and that she wondered what I would think about when I cried, if I cried, and I sat there, sat there bewildered, scarcely daring to breathe, before I opened my mouth, and said to myself that her bosom was not her face, and looked up and said to the earnest face that these sentiments were appreciated and that I was all a-flattered, and my words came out like batterall mushed, and delinquent, and misbehaving.
        Because I went on, thinking of what to say, before I said that in truth, I really loved her too, but that wait, what I meant to say was that I loved the way she spoke, and wrote, and sang (especially), and I figured that I would love the way she thought if I knew the constituents of her mind, but what am I saying, what I mean to say is that if I love you, will you love me, and she said yes, oh glory yes, hallelujah and sunshine brilliance, she said yes, she said yes, she said yes and her bosom was heaving and I reminded myself that this was not her face.
        And so, hand in hand, we wrote some Letters, like the Victorians, and my words in all their urgency came out in verse, for which I apologized, and I explained that my thoughts had become compounded and compacted, and she said that the love was true and that I only had to speak in earnest, for she would always listen. She continued to say that I would love her and she would love me even after the first time I saw her do the kiss-kiss with a man whom others referred to as her boyfriend, and she continued to say that I would love her and she would love me true, during our torrents of sex and verse and sex-verse and even during the rare episodes of thoughts in prose, and this reassured meyes it didbecause how else can it be I asked, even as her tongue plumbed the depths of anothers throat, for we still had our torrents, and I watched her sleep and she called me Whitman, and I said, my name is not Whitman, and she said, it will be.
        But my name is not Whitman.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot
Talking of Michelangelo.
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

