2. Her attractive pain, already I feel better confessing it when relieved, hurried, careless, moving out of the woods I am seized, those last low branches catch at my cloak. The wood of her pain, realer than freedom, as if by an effort of will detains me.

Her low quiet frown at my failure to be there I fancy, I picture smoothing her brow, her spirit relaxing. Then longing and feelings of What am I doing here? overcome me, what is my life but a failure to be there? Time and again love, bewildered, gave up waiting by the clock and went away or so I've flattered myself into believing. A bad mood maw gapes like gray suburbia in me on these occasions when I think to blame myself. Her attractive pain my better judgement shaming as bourgeois.

Her attractive pain regularly busts a dam upriver somewhere and floods my flat places, disrupting all commerce and living, my mismanagement of every resource I possess makes it inevitable that I should spend every weekend afloat on the upended hull of an unfinished ark a phenomenon to be awaited, as DuBois called the appearance of the Negro criminal.