Marie, Marie: unmarried, forty, long about the face and thighs... Without the ellipsis, by which I cede punctuational control, without the animating power of a bankrupt tradition of genderbound erotic apostrophe, how could I speak of her? We met at twenty, in sunlight, introduced by her boyfriend's brother: under a broad straw hat our eyes set immediately to vexing themselves brimful with flirtation. My heart was born that day, I later found. A little seed, it quickly grew, through passions, to more or less the size of the grain of rye in Tolstoi's story. A simple growth: that's to say, it grew drily, retaining all its quiet seed-nature, not changing except in dimensions. A fist-sized seed, then, as inert, as simple as a stone, but with secret intelligence charging it with difference. The swelling, splitting, rootlet-fingering – the pain and joy of germination – came later.