He remembers what the brown owl sounded like while he was sleeping.
The man wakes in the frigid morning thinking about women.
Not with desire so much as with a sense of what is not.
Many days in the woods he wonders what it is that he has for so long hunted down. We go hand in hand, he thinks, into the dark pleasure,
but we are rewarded alone, just as we are married into aloneness.
"Not the Happiness but the Consequence of Happiness," Jack Gilbert
[Damen Avenue below Cortez Street]
