“Dear Mai,” I write, “All is forgiven stay there.”

Nine birds sweep down from the sky and light on the pine tree you planted last fall. The scrawny boughs crack and dip in the snow. 

Today I’ve been watching it snow and thinking of Dorothy. This was in Rochester, before your sister was born, when you were four or five and your father worked most weekends. 

It was one of those utterances that sparkled—the very daring! Could you see us? Canoe shrugged, to be expected. After all, Canoe was our local recovering. Truth be told, it was she who left those pamphlets in the clubhouse next to the men’s Nineteenth Hole.

And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and raped and very nearly killed.

It’s 1976. The sky is low and full of clouds. The grey clouds are bulbous and wrinkled and shiny. The sky looks cerebral. Under the sky is a field, in the wind. A pale highway runs beside the field. Lots of cars go by. One of the cars stops by the side of the highway. 

When autumn comes, the leaves fall off of the trees onto the ground. Actually, I should say it like this: When the leaves fall, autumn is here. I have to work on improving my style. Last time the teacher wrote: Style, wretched. It’s upsetting but there’s nothing I can do about it. I like autumn. 

A light breeze had sprung up, noticeable only as a kind of touch on the temples, and by the shifting shadows of the camphor trees. The voices of the children playing in the grove sounded and echoed from far away in the still evening. 

The pension dining room was cave-like, hung with fishing nets and glass floats, receding backwards to the dark kitchen. He propped up against the water carafe a book which he had taken at random from a shelf of English paper-backs in his bedroom. 

This happens every summer. A tourist hikes into the desert outside Las Vegas without enough water and gets lost. Most of them die. This summer it’s an Italian, a student, twenty years old, according to the Nye County Register. 

Page i (Introduction): For “The problem abstraction” read “The problem of abstraction.” Page iii (Introduction): To “Finally, my thanks to the Graph Arts Press, for their assistance in the compilation