Sea Room

The Improper Persons

The Improper Persons I know there is fact without meaning, details passed over and no regret for them. Days seem to go sadly, a windmill in the plain wind, then a sudden gloom appears like decayed wallpaper of inner rooms when buildings are demolished. A falling apart attracts sympathetic crowds, a curious praise, as people look up to lost souls wavering on ledges. I only called attention to myself. A small unhappiness enlarged, a tear struck a word and the print swelled. In the two homely pages left open after a book is read, a story goes on. I retired with a fascinating blame underlined in green pencil, the love scenes were unmarked and lacked interpretation. Perhaps I have loved the improper persons, the strangers whose speech I have stolen, whose words are embedded in the powders and medicine capsules of love's doom. It's hard to tell of it without dreadful music and petnames said in suffering. I might go too far back to a room's indirect memory, where we once met formally. And at nervous crosswalks, in the parallel urges of these streets 27 I feel it. Even now, when our story is old, a word rewords itself or a love invents more. Each night is long, longer than the shadow of its day. The moon lost all authority but for a minor glistening from no official place. Let dead worlds die out, and a world gone mad, like this, live up to its name. 28 ...