“I should imagine so,” said Mangel. He brooded. Stiffly he got up. “Look here! What sort of nonsense are you making me say? Fanny Luve, I’m a stupid old feller. I don’t know nothing. Thirty years ago I was a stupid young feller. I’m sure. I guess I never knew how to think.”
She held up her face to him.
“I don’t know how to think, either. I am stupid too.”
Abe Mangel shook his head.
“You’re funny. You make me feel we don’t know how to think ... and we don’t know how to be good.... We men and women.”
He smiled with his old eyes. But his brow was frowning. He walked away to Tessie.
* * *
Fanny:—— You are there!
The world is dark, there is no light in the world.
The world is close, I feel you there about me.
You stir, you crouch, you are still.
You do not know that I am here, knowing you.
You lift your voices, they give no sound:
Shrieking they are still.
—Only the dark world
Holding you and me....
No word, no hand-touch, no signal of the eye
Binds us: only
A dark world.
—Yet we are close!
Could one be closer in the Sun,
Loving in the lap of the Spring?
Harry and I, were we so close?
Edith and I ... you in the grip of my bowels, you in the suck of my blood and my heavy breasts.
Were we so close?