The friend who is concerned with backdrops, not us, but what we stand against, his way of looking at the women he loves, to not look at them at all but at roofs, a bit of sky. To understand when exactly a woman is angry because of the way she works her mouth he believes will never be enough. He opens the glass doors of his house as the lawn steams with the music of his daughter. He has bought a piano to lure her to him. The music will never be obsolete, a vision of the world in a perfect rain. As if two friends sat at a table that suddenly appeared with wine, the dishes growing invisible after they were finished. A woman spoke—her voice so full of pain they didn't have to feel pain anymore, no one, not even that woman, and such friends could be direct. All that medicine for your heart makes you lonely. Friend, you might as well look at your daughter, your one instrument, as well as at the air around her, dangling and streaming with music. The music wants you both but knows when to wait a little bit, as if such a daughter cannot help but be destroyed and found again, silent and then crying out, silent and calling and is that perfect, that near a heart. Lee Upton