Fencing
Back, barely. Up out of the plutocratic city, sneeringly. As Emerson asks of wan Nature, I demand of the imperial city: “never show you the wrong side of the tapestry? never come to look dingy & shabby? . . . you have pushed your joke a little too far.” That brash seamlessness, self-satisfying and inert like a rictus grin, wealth-confidence and big toys, an acontemplative lot.
Though, one examines the interrupt’d trajectory with bafflement: whose books be these back here, left open in the middle? Who snatch’d that poor complacent off and replaced him with what? Emerson: “You must treat the days respectfully, you must be a day yourself. . . . Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.”
