Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.

Cat
Masks
Butterfly

From the moment Rebecca Blackwell entered the fourth grade classroom, Maggie felt it, just under her ribs. It stretched between them like a ribbon, tying them together. The class stared at Rebecca, small and thin, with the whitest hair imaginable. Long hair. With Mrs. Resnick’s arm around her fragile shoulders, Rebecca shivered, looking at her black leather shoes.

Kaly came to Palo Alto when she was four years old with her mother and father from New York City. She remembers the house, painted in pure white, where she lived, and how it stood in the middle of a wide emerald lawn bordered by apple orchards, grape vines and roses. Such a change from the brick and brownstone of New York and the Hudson River.

Korba had a smart frock on, on the very day that her husband caught a troll. That fact would have no relationship to the other until you understand that Korba was wearing a frock that had been given to her, not by her husband as one might have hoped, but by a pharmacist whose motives in the affair were just that, to motivate an affair!

Can’t you see my broken heart? It’s torpid. It’s slowly beating. It’s still bleeding. Maybe you can see her, though. She’s beautiful, isn’t she? Maybe I should render for you the quickly passing, tempered and fluctuous hot story we had together…or maybe we should just look again.

It was the angel in the clouds,
the face on the tree,
the driftwood and rock
that looked like a seal, a wolf, a bear.

Predawn, the song sparrow
sings his traditional ballad.
It is the leitmotif
of my life.