Pain/Pin

There is felicity at work behind a mechanic named weasel. More when he scams you.

It shares something, I'll wager, with what I found on Fannie's counter: identity stickers from the American Heart Association, her family name misspelled Lies. Fannie Lies –– boy, does she.

There exists in my life the tendency of symbols to bob in my ken before their realer counter-parts. And thus exists the argument that lived-out lives are amenable to literary analysis. Further, the suggestion that the field of analysis is not exactly a construct, but an impulse sprouted from more ancient education. "One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky. The arts and sciences, like Plato's dialouges, have at their center the drive to confer greater clarity on what already has clear discernibility" (Scarry, 7-8).

As a three year old, my sister fluttered from a three-story building, landing in our yard's sole shrub. In the hospital she told me "I shoulda' known because I thought of that before." She thought of it in a dream.

This is not plainly poetry. Of course, one should apply the same diligent apprehension to symbols as to teachers. Some symbols, in the way of some teachers, are more reliable than others. And there is no surefire method to determine reliability. The best anyone can do is wake-up, remain alert.