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Nimuë Berkowitz.’ She shook her head and scattered day. ‘Gee, thanks!’
    ‘Well, Nimuë, why don’t you select what you consider to be the very best of them and give me that to read.’
    She went carefully through the papers on her lap, biting her superb lower lip as she bent to the task, selecting, rejecting , rejecting, selecting. Kraven watched her. As the poets of his own era of special competence might have said, he sat ‘astonied’. At last, apprehensively, she handed him a sheet of paper. And there in firm round hand appeared the following:
    ‘Relationships’
    by
    Nimuë Berkowitz
    As you walk along life’s highway
    You may often shed a tear,
    But remember while you’re walking,
    I’m walking with you, dear.
    As the road unfolds before you
    And your feet begin to ache,
    I’ll be there to bathe them for you
    In the waters of a lake.
    Up the hills and down the valleys,
    By the ocean’s burning tide,
    Just give a glance to windward
    And you’ll find me at your side
    Whither thou goest, there I will go,
    Hither and thither, yonder and fro.
    ‘Nimuë,’ said Kraven fervently, ‘you are a poetess!’
    ‘O wow!’
    ‘Of course, there is work to be done, some polishing, some slight modifications here and there. Milton called even Shakespeare “a wild, untutored talent”. But of your great gift there can be no doubt.’
    ‘O wow!’
    ‘Perhaps I should be rather more specific in my evaluation and criticism?’
    ‘O yes!’
    Kraven moved from his chair and sat beside her on the couch, his leg inadvertently making firm contact with her own as he held the poem between them.
    ‘First, I would point to the splendid consistency of the central metaphor, life as a journey. Here you write in the grand European tradition, boldly elaborating an image that Dante himself, seven centuries before you, did not scorn to use.’
    She squirmed with delight.
    ‘Then, too, I was particularly struck by the sly introduction of the four elements, the old Ptolemaic cosmology being particularly apt here: the hills and the valleys, the wind, the burning tide – a particularly fine conflation of two elements in one, fire and water, poetic economy of an oxymoronic kind – and finally the ocean and the tears. Now, what does all this mean to the sensitive reader? Well, first, you succeed brilliantly in suggesting at once the timelessness and the universality of the experience; second, you draw together all Creation into a single harmonious whole, a unified poetic vision. But I scarcely need tell
you
this.’
    ‘Wow!’
    ‘The metre is cunningly chosen. It is spritely and optimistic, confident and amiable. More particularly, the rhythms are strong and insistent, quite regular through three stanzas, but pointedly altered in the concluding couplet, where the unexpected change focuses attention on the Biblical allusion.’
    ‘Biblical illusion?’
    ‘Whither thou goest, there I will go.’
    ‘I got that off of a perfume bottle; it’s called Moon of Galilee, and then it says “Whither thou goest,” and that. Here, smell.’
    The delightful creature thrust an exquisite wrist beneath Kraven’s nostrils. He caught her hand in his and inhaled. All the perfumes of the fertile crescent mingled with a whiff of the gym. He retained her hand.
    ‘New Testament or Old?’
    ‘I beg your pardon?’
    ‘The Biblical illusion.’ She frowned. ‘My dad, he’s liberal and like that. I mean, he don’t interfere much. Live and let live is what he says. But like he’s kinda funny about some things. He don’t know about Gabe, y’know, my guy. I mean, he’d like lock me in my room. So the Bible, well hey, I mean, he’d blow his stack.’
    ‘The Old Testament, Nimuë. It’s from Ruth.’
    ‘Great!’
    Kraven absentmindedly caressed her hand. ‘Above all, I’m attracted to your poem’s sentiment. It is at once sincere and emotionally charged, frankly passionate and unobtrusively calm.’
    ‘No shit?’
    ‘It is clear to me that