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62 AFTER DROPPING THE KIDS OFF, the sun repeals his loneliness, and his vision overflows. He says hello to Mike, and Mike’s lawn mower roars back as if to say What a beautiful idea, a lawn mower! purring Pythagoras and solving the lawn as if lawns were green equations. He nods and waves to Penelope, whose upper lip is the white underside of a leaf. The lilies are uncoiled hose, the closed roses, Juliet’s nipples. His hand rises and his thoughts rush to the edge of his eyes and lean over, astonished. He is that ghostly smudge in the sun-bludgeoned windshield of an accelerating car. He is an American Orpheus with no passport or portfolio. He begins to forgive things that happened to othersto his father’s barber, his favorite teacher, figures in history, characters in novelsand remembers a boy unpeeling and flinging his clothes off a Paris roof, those men with their big ears and gangster clothes reading soaked foreign newspapers, that funny-faced blur shaking in the soapy water. The day is a spectacular air show over the ocean. Everything he knows is uniquely everyday. He is in the press box and his life is standing room only. That whistling sound is his soul’s happy heigh-ho. All that he cannot find in his life up to now is spread out like a yard sale. His thought is a physical law, a thing in the world. Long blue poles run from his eyeballs and hold the sky-tent up over all. He catches his breath, 63 ambushed by ecstasy. How he loves his life is what he must explain. Life is writing an essay and I am the topic sentence. Mike has finished mowing. The silence is devastating. Things stink of life. ...

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