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just to keep one eye cocked on me; and the whole tree shook with his silent laughter when he saw all my thoughts running away with me. In the forest there was rustling everywhere; animals snuffled, birds called to each other, their whirring mingled with that of the moths so that there was a sound as of whispering back and forth all over the forest. How much there was to hear! For three nights I did not sleep, I thought of Diderik and Iselin.
    See, I thought, they might come. And Iselin would lure Diderik over to a tree and say: “Stand here, Diderik, and watch, keep guard over Iselin; that hunter shall tie my shoelace.”
    And I am that hunter and she will sign to me with her eyes so that I may understand. And when she comes, my heart understands all and it no longer beats, it booms. And she is naked under her dress from head to foot and I place my hand on her.
    “Tie my shoelace!” she says with flaming cheeks. And in a little while she whispers against my mouth, against my lips: “Oh, you are not tying my shoelace, you my dearest heart, you are not tying . . . not tying my . . .”
    But the sun dips his face into the sea and comes up again, red, refreshed, as if he had been down to drink. And the air is filled with whispers.
    An hour later she says against my mouth: “Now I must leave you.”
    And she waves back to me as she goes and her face is still flaming, her face is tender and ecstatic. Again she turns to me and waves.
    But Diderik steps forth from the tree and says: “Iselin, what were you doing? I saw you.”
    She answers: “Diderik, did you see? I did nothing.”
    “Iselin, I saw you do it,” he says again. “I saw.”
    Then her loud and happy laughter sounds through the forest and she walks away with him, exulting and sinful from head to foot. And where does she go? To the next one, a hunter in the forest.
    It was midnight. [My dog] Aesop had broken loose and was out hunting on his own; I heard him baying up in the hills and when I finally had him again it was one o’clock. A goatherd girl came along; she was knitting a stocking and humming and looking about her. But where was her flock? And what was she doing there in the forest at midnight? Nothing, nothing. Perhaps she was restive, perhaps just glad to be alive, what does it matter? I thought: she has heard Aesop barking and knows I am out in the forest.
    When she came, I stood up and looked at her and saw how young and slender she was. Aesop also stood and looked at her.
    “Where are you from?” I asked her.
    “From the mill,” she answered.
    But what could she have been doing in the mill so late at night?
    “How is it that you dare to walk here in the forest so late at night,” I said, “you who are so young and slender?”
    She laughed and answered: “I am not so young, I am nineteen.”
    But she could not have been nineteen, I am convinced that she was lying and was only seventeen. But why did she lie and pretend to be older?
    “Sit down,” I said, “and tell me what they call you.”
    And, blushing, she sat down by my side and said she was called Henriette.
    I asked: “Have you a sweetheart, Henriette, and has he ever embraced you?”
    “Yes,” she answered with an embarrassed laugh.
    “How many times already?”
    She remains silent.
    “How many times?” I repeated.
    “Twice,” she said softly.
    —translated by James W. McFarlane

from Elegy XIX: “To His Mistress Going to Bed”
     
    JOHN DONNE
    Let us praise Eve. Without her impertinent nibble, we’d never have had the joy of undressing or of being undressed. Nudity is nice—I am wont to walk the beach un-thonged, slide between the sheets pajamaless, and once I attended a party where the requisite costume was none —but naked skin requires a having been clothed–ness to actualize its full appeal. A world without clothes would display its nudity like scenes from National Geographic, or, worse still, like the aging hippie leftovers in the nudist colonies of Goa on the