Triple Abracadabra Blessing Silent as the Pines

"I'm not starving for pleasure," the Mayakovsky Tree said, "nor for the free love of an exquisite caprice. Your ardor is exhausting."

Rise above him? If John Yoo makes a savage so good, he has well served his purpose. John Yoo, squirrel and rover and ravener, manslayer and thief, is in his house of mohair the kindest host and most generous of men. Every new mischance makes us forget these strange coincidences.

What if my saliva blossoms on the jasmine? I can flee the quidnunc on the window sill across the street but not the torturing curiosity of the orange tree.

A truce now to ambiguities. Things will revert to their previous state of rot before you mow the thistle-fields. John Yoo, the baleful squirrel in the bole, borrows from the Mayakovsky Tree what the deeper and higher mind of the Mayakovsky Tree no longer believes. He welters in the mud with the lowest and most degenerate.

Even Samuel Alito can be longwinded and shortsighted on occasions. Mrs. Alito cried when she got up to leave the table -- I wish it were in my power to add an inch of Mayakovsky limb to hers!

A shade of heliotrope, a pink and straw surface, a play between devotion and diabolism, a caterwauling, a votary, a tang of lubricity. An allusion to March-cats. Mrs. Alito then takes some gold pieces in her hand. Tomorrow she is coming to see my empty wicker newspaper basket bed, and to cook for me a dish of Mojadderah.

Ah, the old days, asleep under the ottoman! I ask her what she is going to do with all this money.

"A policeman in a shabby uniform imagines the worst," Mrs. Alito says. "He is as oleaginous as a dust-coat in summer." A mouse inside the radiator stirs the nostrils of a whole city but brings me not a single olive. I cheer those who crown her on a dung-hill with wreaths of stable straw.