That Scot profile, so chiseled, that bluecap voice, so warm, that hair of hers, softer than Juliet’s... A great rock, a sea boulder, surrounded by waves, glows in the moonlight...her skin is whitened: a ringlet glows on her neck.
Marlowe, Jonson, Raleigh, Spenser have had their days in jail; I have had mine—those county sties where pigs and dust ate my manuscripts and foetid odors ate my skull, jailed by the local thief who deemed each man a thief who thought:
If all the world and love were young...
But Raleigh it never was except in fancy and during the dead reckoning on paper: that is why the five of us stumbled backward in time, learning and escaping simultaneously.
We used to play chess, many of us, pawns, varlets, kings, knights, evenings, one play bastinadoed on another, Caesar against Titus, Hamlet against Lear, Portia against Cleopatra—always a gamble, along the stinking alleys, along the nocturnal slugtide Thames, along the turtle sea: stonehenge of concupiscence, murder vs. philandering, octogenarian vs. boy, sex vs. cuirass, check vs. cul-de-sac.
Everyman knows the exquisite desire for a woman; he also knows the ravening need...when there is no woman.
