JIM GETS BACK FROM SEEING HIS SHRINK

Jim had just got back from seeing his psychiatrist, and although Dr. Veeck had said, We have to stop now, Jim, ..... or did he say, Jim, we have to stop now?, although Veeck might've been done with Jim, Jim wasn't done with Jim. Treetops are not so high, Jim thought metaphorically, or perhaps allegorically, Nor I so low that I don't instinctively know how it would be to fly through gaps that the wind makes, when the leaves arouse and there is a lifting of boughs that settle and lift again. Whatever my kind may be, it is not absurd to confuse myself with a bird for the space of a reverie. My species never flew, but I somehow know it is something that long ago I almost adapted to. These were not really Jim's words, although he did think this way, after seeing Dr. Veeck and venting. They were the words of his friend Rich Wilbur, who, under the glow of the northern sky, had written them down on the back of some printout the previous autumn. But Wilbur's words expressed the way Jim was feeling better than Jim could, so he felt justified in a bit of indulgent semi-ethical, semi-unethical plagiarism. Hell, Jim mused, if a goddamn tree falls in the forest, and a poet's words are carved into its trunk, and nobody's present to read them ..... his thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. It was Teddy Kennedy. Then Jim woke up from his dream.