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sneaky.
    â€œMag-gie!” the kids are calling under the railroad bridge where they’ve been swimming. The freight train still rumbles over a hundred cars long, the engine threw the flare on little white bathers, little Picasso horses of the night as dense and tragic in the gloom comes my soul looking for what was there that disappeared and left, lost, down a path—the gloom of love. Maggie, the girl I loved.

7
    In winter night Massachusetts Street is dismal, the ground’s frozen cold, the ruts and pock holes have ice, thin snow slides over the jagged black cracks. The river is frozen to stolidity, waits; hung on a shore with remnant show-off boughs of June—Ice skaters, Swedes, Irish girls, yellers and singers—they throng on the white ice beneath the crinkly stars that have no altar moon, no voice, but down heavy tragic space make halyards of Heaven on in deep, to where the figures fantastic amassed by scientists cream in a cold mass; the veil of Heaven on tiaras and diadems of a great Eternity Brunette called night.
    Among these skaters Maggie performed; in her sweet white skates, white muff, you see the flash of her eye in their pools of darkness all the more strikingly: the pinkness of her cheek, her hair, the crown of her eyes corona’d by God’s own bent wing—For all I knew as I toasted my skated feet at Concord River fires in the February Lowell, Maggie could have been the mother or the daughter of God—
    Dirty snow piled in the gutters of Massachusetts Street, something forlorn hid in little pits of dirt, dark—the mute companions of my midnight walks from the overpowering lavish of her kisses.
    She gave me a kiss upsidedown in the chair, it was a winter night not long after I’d met her, I was in the dark room with the big radio with its throbbish big brown dial that Vinny also had in his house and I’m rocking in the chair, Mrs. Cassidy her mother is in her own kitchen the way my mother three miles across town was—same old big old good old Lowell lady in her eternity wiping the dishes putting them away in the clean cupboards with that little feminate neatness and orderly ideas of how to go about things—Maggie’s on the porch goofing in the icy night a minute with Bessy Jones her chum from the bungalow across the street, a big fat red-haired goodnatured girl with freckles and whose inconceivably feeble little brother sometimes delivered me notes from Maggie written the night before school in some brown light of her bedroom or in the morning at pipe keen frost, to hand to him, over the crackly fence, and he in his usual round of days trudged to school two miles away or took the bus and as he rheumy-eyedly weepingly came into his Spanish class which was every morning the second and impossibly dull he handed me the note sometimes with a feeble little joke—just a little kid, for some reason they’d shoved him on to high school through red morning cold parochials where he skipped grades and missed the sixth, or fifth, or both, and here he was a little kid with a hunting rag cap with a Scottish haggle tassel and we believed him to be like our age. Maggie would plant the note in his thin freckly hand, Bessy’d be giggling from behind the open kitchen window, she’s taking advantage of the window being open and also putting the empty milk-bottles out. Little Massachusetts Street in the cold mornings of rosy snow sun in January is alive with the fragrant whip of blacksmoke from all the cottage chimneys; on the white frozen cap of the Concord River we see last night’s bonfire a charred ruinous black spot near the thin bare reddish reeds of the other shore; the whistle of the Boston and Maine engine sounds across the trees, you shudder and pull your coat tighter to hear it. Bessy Jones . . . sometimes she’d write notes to me too, giving instructions on how to win Maggie, that Maggie’d also read. I accepted