A Table of Green Fields, Guy Davenport [ebook reader screen .TXT] 📗

CD, then the figure ABDC is a parallelogram. A parallelogram having all its sides equal and its angles right is a square.

Sven imagined Erika naked and glossy on the textileless beach, the fuzz, so much darker than her hair, on her plump sex with its covert furrow. Mikkel received this as Professor Pedersen's trendy admonitions, which Erika took off at the polser wagon as Political! Political! clucked the hen, political correctness! And Deconstruction! cawed the crow.

Sven cupped his hand over his crotch. Mikkel, looking merry, shoved his hand deep between his legs, pulling it up in a slow scoop.

Red poultry with blue legs at Grandpa Ib's, whose farmhouse had elvishly small rooms, stairs as steep as a ladder, stone floor in the kitchen, flowers all around the house so that you looked out the windows through hollyhocks and larkspur, the old thrown-glass panes putting spirals and cunning warps into the stable's thatch (with gold and green moss), the meadow with cows and one horse, the dirt road to the village hedged high with hawthorn. He and Mikkel had spent weeks there, sleeping in the narrow feather bed in the attic, rolled into each other by the pliant depth of the mattress.

Mikkel, looking hard into Sven's eyes (while a dog barked down the street and an automobile crunched along the gravel of a drive and killed its motor), decided to confuse the hell out of Sven by stacking images: having a wienerbrad and coffee with Erika in the Arcade (speaking French with, as Erika said, a Swedish accent), Biff in the comicbook the fly of whose jeans bows out in a saddle stain colored yellow, Pastor Tvemunding explaining, with a twinkle in his eye, how Danish liberalism is consonant with the deepest spirit of the church, and how love is always an expression of God's will.

If to any point in a circumference, videlicet B, there be drawn a diameter FCB, and from the point B, perpendicular to that diameter, there be drawn the line BH; that line is called a tangent to the circle in the point B; which tangent can touch the circle only in one point B, else if it touched it in more, it would go within it, and not be a tangent but a chord.

The tangent of any arc AB is a right line drawn perpendicular to a diameter through the one end of the arc B, and terminated by a line CAH, drawn from the center through the other end A; thus BH is the tangent of the arc AB.

Sven (with satiric modesty) slid his zipper open, pushed his pants down and off. Underpants a minislip from Ilium's, size lille, dingy white with an ochre smutch on the pouch. Mikkel shoved down his jeans and with some shuffling and plucking got them off. Minislip Dim (fabriqué en France), Greek blue with a white waistband.

What an arc wants of a quadrant is called the complement of that arc; thus AE, being what the arc AB wants of the quadrant EB, is called the complement of the arc AB. And what an arc wants of a semicircle is called the supplement of that arc; thus since AF is what the arc AB wants of the semicircle BAF, it is the supplement of the arc AB.

The sine, tangent, et caetera, of the complement of any arc is called the cosine, cotangent, et caetera of that arc.

Sven slid his eyes to the right toward the sound of an automobile stopping. Mikkel raised his shoulders a smidgen and showed his palms, either in brave nonchalance or acceptance of the contrariness of fate. They listened for footsteps which they did not hear. Their scoutmaster Stefan Ulfson (from the Fyn, a student in geology) was discussing personal space. Too close, too far. He had asked Mikkel and Sven to stand three meters from each other and start a conversation. You feel awkward at that distance, don't you? Take one step forward and try again. Show us at what distance you feel comfortable and relaxed talking to each other. It was unkind to big Stefan, but they closed the distance between them until they were toe to toe, nose to nose. It was a rabbity scrunch in Sven's nose that made Mikkel certain of the image, and he jounced the neb of his nose in confirmation.

The sine of the supplement of an arc is the same with the sine of the arc itself; for, drawing them according to the definitions, there results the selfsame line. A right-lined angle is measured by an arc of a circle described upon the angular point as a center, comprehended between the two legs that form the angle; thus the angle ABD is measured by the arc AD of the circle CADE that is described upon the point B as a center; and the angle is said to be of as many degrees as the arc is; so if the arc AD be 45 degrees, then the angle ABD is said to be an angle of 45 degrees. Hence the angles are greater or less, according as the arc described about the angular point and terminated by the two legs contains a greater or less number of degrees.

The silence between them was fused with the low-angled late afternoon sunlight that gilded their bodies. Their minds were mirrors of each other. Whether they stood for a minute or half an hour breathing evenly, looking into each other's eyes, before Sven lowered his gaze to Mikkel's briefs and bent forward to remove his own, and Mikkel his, neither could say. Sven's penis jutted limber and rising from a clump of ginger hair that tangled down around his plump scrotum. A disc of glans, with eyelet, filled the foreskin's opening. Mikkel's lifted erect, slipping its foreskin as it rose and grew. His pubic hair was reddish and thicker than Sven's.

From Sven, a simple smile, and sigh, his first sound since they'd come into the room. He tossed his briefs to Mikkel, who drew them on as best he could, considering. Sven waited until he was as erect as Mikkel before pulling on Mikkel's underpants.

The bil rolling into the drive was the one they had been listening for. They stepped closer and grinned into each other's eyes. They were dressed when there were sounds of Mikkel's mother and grocery bags in the kitchen.

There is no force however