in, among, amid people
each like a wind, each wanting you face to face its way, and with the wind's
ineluctable reach compelling you - invisibly - as might oh - so - many
helpful steering palms at your helpless elbow: wife and lover, full of
silent entreaty: parents, friends, bringing to bear what once one
could call "the very breath of
their being": students, crit-
ics, colleagues, puffing from
every point like those cherubs
of the wind till their urging,
your yielding, flood the whole
compass . . . except perhaps
here, on this little windless
page, where I'm beseeched by no one, heard by no one - unaffected,
unaffecting - and can point my own direction if I any longer have
one; live as though I have (and had) a life; let this vacant paper win -
dow frame a world
[The Tunnel, Gass, W. H.]
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