Sublime

in the garden who’ll win, I think

sleek-haired, brown-skinned, quick and deft in all her movements; she reminded me of a wren.

perhaps the agony of losing Patroclus has swallowed every lesser grief.

Dogs leaping up and down on the end of their leashes like black scribbles on the air.

Isn’t that love’s highest aim? Not the interchange of two free minds, but a single, fused identity? I remembered seeing them on the beach the night I’d followed Patroclus down to the sea. This was what I’d glimpsed then.

His idea of female beauty was a woman so fat if you slapped her backside in the morning she’d still be jiggling when you got back home for dinner.

the one thing this war has shown conclusively is how amazingly and repulsively belligerent women are. Some women

fishermen: darting eyes, caught in nets of wrinkles,

She didn’t know how to leave him behind in the Dissecting Room, where, session after session, the slim girls swarmed over him like coffin beetles, reducing him to the final elegance of bone.