Dan Enters

Only because he had looked unfamiliar, the way a house takes light, the way a light takes mesmerism, the sky revealing for one period of satisfied lyricism its gold and pink treasure, my brother’s house in western Michigan, the lake and the great state of Wisconsin waiting on its opposing shore, like an old pal. Do not think I am someone understanding the certain satisfaction of sense impressions, but as they appear to the artistic mind, the counteracting and the mobility, the sense of appropriate proportion. Largeness will only make matters scan; the frame bends unjustly to exclude. He thought he was a lot smarter than he was. To be full of grief, to be full of mistrust for mostly living, with details, the very small, because I do not stroll outside of the inhabited grip. You could tell too because he was talking, and I always had the suspicion that perhaps he was not talking. How dumb Randy was to think that that other woman, looking backward, would fold over, like clothes, and was married, to the first man who saved her life, to the second man, who had stepped on her face. But this is not to be precise. Randy cared nothing for precision. The kind of man who learned to counteract feelings of grief with the understanding of the mistake of it, to have been at all, although, being very prone to foolishness, no matter all the young gentlemen today appear to be dressed in mourning, for never having been at all. Grief stains the language of grief, Randy, the fifty thousand dollars he was given because he was unhappy, because he fell among painters, only they were arranging rather than leaving their wives behind, the furniture in the rooms where they conversed, fully dressed, the windows, a thousand to the left, divorced from the wall the way light is divorced from falling and is finished on the finished wood floor, hardened into a pool of shadow beneath the domestic sofa bed. Guys who think they are, and the women who think they are. The smart talk at the curve. As he had been thinking he was ahead of it, how stupid they are, not to be. Randy, for months with painful self-appropriation. They want you to feel sorry for them, say awww no you’re not.