How can you stand it—looking at things? For example, the geranium out on the patio, the single pink blossom in the sun? Or stand the sunlight moving through it, illuminating, holding the flower open like a high clear note, an ecstatic widening which arrives, arrives. What do you dowith it? While the shrubs and the lowest overhanging leaves lift slightly in the wind, the blossom doesn't move. It's the object of affection, and this is how it hurts you: by holding the note open— Past the front of the apartment, traffic goes by: one truck, then another comes on, disappears. And I have the blossom in my vision— sunlight, like vision, making clear the tiniest hidden veins. I don't know why I should be here, alive and having to see this, this bright thing living in time or have to see it later, at the end of the afternoon, when the sun's lower, its light diagonal across the pot, its light then pulling away across the mossed brick like a wave, only slower, slower. The blossom is still pink, but no longer brilliant. I'll go back into the kitchen. But you, are you stronger than I? Can you stay in love with it? Make promises, marry it? Are you so sure of your position in the world?