For Echo Is The Soul

I Love The Performance Of A Craft, Whether It Is Modest Or Mean-spirited, Yet I Walk Away When Discussions Of It Begin - As If One Should Ask A Gravedigger What Brand Of Shovel He Uses Or Whether He Prefers To Work At Noon Or In Moonlight. I Am Interested Only In The Care Taken, And Those Secret Rehearsals Behind It. Even If I Do Not Understand Fully What Is Taking Place.

If Any Of You On Your Journeys See Her-shout To Me, Whistle...he Sang, And It Became A Habit For Audiences To Shout And Whistle In Response To Those Lines. There Was Nowhere He Could Hide In Such A Song That Had All Of Its Doors And Windows Open, So That He Could Walk Out Of It Artlessly, The Antiphonal Responses Blending With Him As If He Were No Longer On Stage.

You Can See That The Care He Took Defiling The Beauty He Had Forced In Them Was As Precise And Clean As His Good Hands Which At Night Had Developed The Negatives, Floating The Sheets In The Correct Acids And Watching The Faces And Breasts And Pubic Triangles And Sofas Emerge. The Making And Destroying Coming From The Same Source, Same Lust, Same Surgery His Brain Was Capable Of. (on New Orleans Photographer E. J. Bellocq)

We Are Expanded By Tears, We Are Told, Not Reduced By Them.

It's An Odd State To Be In, Blowing The Whistle On Your Home Country.