A man was crossing the vacant floor towards him. The distance between them was so great this took an hour or two, and in that time Thomas felt no anxiety and no surprise: ‘James,’ he said, smiling with an uncompromised happiness he knew would be brief, and taking account of the ways in which the man was altered.

Nothing and no one existed in a vacuum. Charlie in his armchair in his house had been only one slice of his terrain. The wake had revealed the woman at the bus stop, the friends he shared drinks with, fellow poetry-lovers, nice men at his miserable job. Bitter relatives, stunned daughters.

She sees him walk in, all self-assured self-hatred and she thinks to herself that he’s got one of them faces that makes you want to take it in your palms and stare at it she looks away quickly, she don’t say nothing. He turns from the bar, notices her hands around her glass, struck dumb by the grace of them, and desperate to say something. He wakes

the significance doesn’t matter. The historical significance deadens it. Across those unbridgeable distances—between bird and painter, painting and viewer—I hear only too well what’s being said to me, a psst from an alleyway as Hobie put it, across four hundred years of time, and it’s really very personal and specific. It’s there in the light-rinse