He was happy because bicycling season and butterflying season were synchronous. Ballad-singers built intricate masses of sexual energy around themselves while they worked their looms. In wooden rooms, such a vibration of formerly living tissues! “The tissues that comprise my body” (he was thinking out loud into the empty space) “share ancestry with those of these broad wolf-pine planks.” It was like the erotic sympathy that overtook him in old cemeteries: Selastina, Barberry, Patience—graved in slate, their unlikely names were the mouths and hands with which the unwedded dead worried his flesh. Dust, lust: he’d intended exploiting the rhyme in some sort of testament until he found he’d been beaten to it, with preclusive success, by Charles Cotton, a minor poet of the seventeenth century. Women create flesh, eye, limb; further, we weave the magic field of sex-pleasure which sets the first stitches of such creation. Men practice power, pretend it’s pleasure; but it’s not. They consume, discard; are disposable thereby; don’t have the patience that pleasure takes. He entered the room and the hushy thump of looming ceased. Penelope looked up from her work, two yards of bright textile filling her lap.