Good Looks for Max
Here you are again; your handwriting, at least.
In my copy of Good Looks, page twelve, you’ve underlined in pencil: The bodies are weapons, someone will die of them. Did you just think it a good line? What did it mean to you twenty-plus years ago? Against You must abandon your pain, it is someone else’s (also underlined), you’ve written a bit like 1965-6 Dylan — as it is. There was a time, a long time, I’d have rubbed it out as I started to in my Seamus Heaney Selected Poems. But now all’s past amend, let the faint, wavering marks stand, as though you’d just written them — you’re smoking, of course, flicking ash, just like I do, excited at your own thought, at the act of trespass, still quick with promise, still friends with possibility.
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