Halvard Johnson
		Store Clerk in a Bookshop & Other Felicities for David Howard For some time during the war, accountants disembarked without fixed occupations, their little black bags full of cigarettes, soaps - witnesses of the well-dressed ones, defining the chronology of Italian poetry, a vague, discontinuous delineation of private facts, perhaps even evasive. It is known that for some time in Milan he was a store clerk in a bookshop . . . a strange joy of living, this in the time in which hermeneutics, more than continuation, was the poetical current. Therefore, in the sense that impossibility or inability gushes forth to establish and express a rational, recognizable relationship with the world - the nature of his native land, sometimes sweet, sometimes ungrateful, but always the atmosphere in which the poet - he or she - lives, just like others, expressing, in similar ways and with the same language, pain, joy, and melancholy. He (she) knows how to pick up on the natural ex- travaganzas embezzled from alienation, caught up in space, its vacation from history - facts having more to do with things than persons. Voices - then hisses - stronger and stronger in the noisy dawn.
		Recompense 1. presence ofitself, combinedwith modesty—tremendous news of their coming she replied, her voiceclear as its own depthin sound of the “ping” that faintly edges spoken words, low woodwinds, her even joyful hint of sorrow Happy? she answered thinking of love the child that she will bear 2. days later, listening to early-morning news on TV, heard he was dead and realized weeks—even months—of dread changed all arrangements for day drove to New York and on arrival, placed myself at nothing to do, wanted to be of use, asked to be present 3. in twilight chapel, floor end to end, surface disappeared its painted universe there of itself first muted colors before restorations of great stilled figures in their narrative of creation, sin, andpower impossible not to think they unfolded into form work of a man who knew more than nature