From a distance it was catharsis, but up close it was design, with arcs and lines in her movements; there is balance, variation and a sense of completeness in her performance.
And not quite under the shelter on the northbound platform, an old man, the sun behind him, just his crown ablaze; and heading southbound, a woman inching ever nearer the platform edge, the light a tear across her midriff, ribcage, shoulders, closer and closer that dearest thing, completeness, all her darkness light at the one time.
She recognizes her own "thirst for completeness and wholeness," but becomes increasingly aware that this thirst cannot be quenched.
But never a word comes from Caterina, and the completeness of her disappearance is a demonstration, Orso thinks, of how the humble of the world can sink from view.
Whatever form Leviston chooses, from the abbreviated sonnets of "Athenaeum" to a clipped short-lined quatrain or the rangy rhymed octets of "Woodland Burial", she achieves a sense of decisive cleanliness, the momentum of the verse matching the steady completeness of her attention and then shifting gear at need.
There is Mickey's brother Harry, who shows up (in the always welcome person of David Margulies) to ask a favor, and there is a black actress of a certain age who dispenses wisdom (I mention her only for the sake of completeness — it's a throwaway part).
Darwent wrote, "Even her fingers, absent-mindedly circled, suggest completeness.
The degree of coherence of a person's self-identity appeared to be related to the completeness of his or her personal life story, in the sense of their objective knowledge and subjective experience of it.
Perhaps the most erotic passage in O'Brien's fiction concerns a bicycle that nuzzles up to our hero in a moment of need: How can I convey the perfection of my comfort on the bicycle, the completeness of my union with her, the sweet responses she gave me at every particle of her frame?..
"Any biography of Sylvia Plath written during the lifetimes of her family and friends must take their vulnerability into consideration, even if completeness suffers from it," she wrote in her preface.
