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Eyes high, landscaped, boulevarded, ritualled, heralded, beflagged in that selfsame New World Sun the beating heart held up to it)—her heart beating in the Frisco rain, on the fence, facing last facts, ready to go run down the land now and go back and foldin again where she was and where was all—consoling herself with visions of truth—coming down off the fence, on tiptoe moving ahead, finding a hall, shuddering, sneaking—
    “I’d made up my mind, I’d erected some structure, it was like, but I can’t—.” Making a new start, starting from flesh in the rain, “Why should anyone want to harm my little heart, my feet, my little hands, my skin that I’m wrapt in because God wants me warm and Inside, my toes—why did God make all this all so decayable and dieable and harmable and wants to make me realize and scream—why the wild ground and bodies bare and breaks—I quaked when the giver creamed, when my father screamed, my mother dreamed—I started small and ballooned up and now I’m big and a naked child again and only to cry and fear.—Ah—Protect yourself, angel of no harm, you who’ve never and could never harm and crack another innocent its shell and thin veiled pain—wrap a robe around you, honey lamb—protect yourself from rain and wait, till Daddy comes again, and Mama throws you warm inside her valley of the moon, loom at the loom of patient time, be happy in the mornings.”—Making a new start, shivering, out of the alley night naked in the skin and on wood feet to the stained door of some neighbor—knocking—the woman coming to the door in answer to the frightened butter knock knuckles, sees the naked browngirl, frightened—(“Here is a woman, a soul in my rain, she looks at me, she is frightened.”)—“Knocking on this perfect stranger’s door, sure.” — “Thinking I was just going down the street to Betty’s and back, promised her
meaning
it deeply I’d bring the clothes back and she did let me in and she got a blanket and wrapped it around me, then the clothes, and luckily she was alone—an Italian woman.—And in the alley I’d all come out and
on,
it was now first clothes, then I’d go to Betty’s and get two bucks—then buy this brooch I’d seen that afternoon at some place with old seawood in the window, at North Beach, art handicraft ironwork like, a shoppey, it was the first symbol I was going toallow myself.”—“Sure.”—Out of the naked rain to a robe, to innocence shrouding in, then the decoration of God and religious sweetness.—“Like when I had that fist fight with Jack Steen it was in my mind strongly.”—“Fist fight with Jack Steen?”—“This was earlier, all the junkies in Ross’s room, tying up and shooting with Pusher, you know Pusher, well I took my clothes off there too—it was … all … part of the same … flip …”—“But this
clothes,
this
clothes!”
(to myself).—“I stood in the middle of the room flipping and Pusher was plucking at the guitar, just one string, and I went up to him and said, ‘Man don’t pluck those dirty notes at ME,’ and like he just got up without a word and left.”—And Jack Steen was furious at her and thought if he hit her and knocked her out with his fists she’d come to her senses so he slugged at her but she was just as strong as he (anemic pale 110 lb. junkey ascetics of America), blam, they fought it out before the weary others.—She’d pulled wrists with Jack, Julien, beat them practically—“Like Julien finally won at wrists but he really furiously had to put me down to do it and hurt me and was really upset” (gleeful little shniffle thru the little out-teeth)—so there she’d been fighting it out with Jack Steen and really almost licking him but he was furious and neighbors downstairs called cops who came and had to be explained to—“dancing.”—“But that day I’d seen this iron thing, a little brooch with a beautiful dull sheen, to be worn around the neck, you know