Chapter LXV

LXV

So look at what I am now.

I am a reviewer with no craft left to review with. I am a signature at the bottom of a page I did not read. I am a city without walls — I am borrowing that, he said it first, and I did not understand it until this year. I am a house with the doors taken off it. I am salt that still looks like salt. I am a well that ran clear and cold for a hundred years and something has been put in it upstream. I am a man with nineteen years of judgment and no occasion on which to use any of it. I am a teacher with nobody asking. I am a burned out candle that cannot be lit, which he also said, and which I did not think was about me until I had read it twice.