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love. Some gigantic sexual drive was behind these futile long smooches, sometimes our teeth’d grind, our mouths burn from interchanged spittle, our lips blister, bleed, chap—We were scared.
    I lay there on my side with my arm around her neck, my hand gripped on her rib, and I ate her lips and she mine. There were interesting crises. . . . No way to go further without fighting. After that we’d just sit and gab in the black of the parlor while the family slept and the radio played low. One night I heard her father come in the kitchen door—I had no idea then of the great fogs rolling over fields by the sea in Nova Scotia and the poor little cottages in lost storms, sad work, wintry work in the bottom of life, the sad men with pails who walk in fields—the new form of the sun every morning—Ah I loved my Maggie, I wanted to eat her, bring her home, hide her in the heart of my life the rest of my days. I prayed in Sainte Jeanne d’Arc church for the grace of her love; I’d almost forgotten . . .
    Let me sing the beauty of my Maggie. Legs:—the knees attached to the thighs, knees shiny, thighs like milk. Arms:—the levers of my content, the serpents of my joy. Back:—the sight of that in a strange street of dreams in the middle of Heaven would make me fall sitting from glad recognition. Ribs?—she had some melted and round like a well formed apple, from her thigh bones to waist I saw the earth roll. In her neck I hid myself like a lost snow goose of Australia, seeking the perfume of her breast. . . . She didnt let me, she was a good girl. The poor big alley cat with her, though almost a year younger, had black ideas about her legs that he hid from himself, also in his prayers didnt mention . . . the dog. Across the big world darkness I’ve come, in boat, in bus, in airplane, in train standing my shadow immense traversing the fields and the redness of engine boilers behind me making me omnipotent upon the earth of the night, like God—but I have never made love with a little finger that has won me since. I gnawed her face with my eyes; she loved that; and that was bastardly I didnt know she loved me—I didnt understand.
    â€œJack—,” after we’d had all our conversations about the kids she fiddled with all day, while I was at school and since I’d last seen her, the gossip, things of high school kids talking about others their age, the stories, rumors, news of the dance, of marriage . . . “Jack, marry me some day.”
    â€œYes, yes, always—nobody else.”
    â€œYou sure there’s nobody else?”
    â€œWell who could be?” I didnt love the girl Maggie was jealous of, Pauline, who’d found me standing in the gang of football players one night in autumn at a dance where I’d gone because there was a banquet for the players and a basketball game we wanted to see, boy stuff—I was waiting in the corner for the dance to end, the idea of dancing with a girl was impossible but I had it concealed—She picked me out of a corner like young men dream. She said, “Hey I like you!—you’re bashful, I like bashful people!” and drew me tremblingly excitingly to the floor, great eyes in mine, and pulled my body and hers and squeezed me interestingly and made me “dance” to talk, to get acquainted—the smell of her hair was killing me! In her door at home she was looking at me with the moon in her eyes, saying, “If you wont kiss me I’ll kiss you” and opened the screendoor I’d just closed and gave me a cool kiss—We had talked about kisses looking at each other’s mouths all night; we had said we werent interested in such things—“I’m a good girl, I believe in h-hmmm—kissing”—flutter—“but I mean I wouldnt allow anything beyond that to happen”—like in New England the