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Overloading the Machine

Last Thursday

Resistance. Channel clicks.
On our walk we turned up stories
Reaching the sky, to climb later.
What fruit rolling in the bowl
You felt me. We explained,
Young, late and invigorated
In the flecked mirror. All patient, insistent.
Past the punctured seams the gown drifts
One early-on press. Coax,
We turned a dry topic or two,
Somber dances of holding out,
You were irrevocable, marching as minutes
The sun couldn't tick, recoiling at some failed mission.
And serene. Arcs to electric,
The path vanishing in twist.
A test
Wrinkles the eyes on either side
These years one visit. It boiled
Rust water of news. It sought
Too much essence in all encounters. From each time bargained
An etched trinket. But observe, incessant plan:
We fly confident. To red box the calendar
On the lover's wall. No doubting hours, the fingertips.

The Least Successful Collector Betsy Baker played a central role in the history of collecting. She was employed as a servant in the house of John Warburton (1682-1759) who had amassed a fine collection of 58 first edition plays, including most of the works of Shakespeare. One day Warburton returned home to find 55 of them charred beyond legibility. Betsy had either burned them or used them as pie bottoms. The remaining three folios are now in the British Museum. The only comparable literary figure was the maid who in 1835 burned the manuscript of the first volume of Thomas Carlyle's "The Hisory of the French Revolution", thinking it was wastepaper.

-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"