QUOTE : He pulled a few pages from his bag and sort them toward me, saying Here, I've been working more on this. I was disappointed to see the slightest of the poems he had given me on top, a generic hymn to a feminine ideal, full of exaggerated praise and capitalize pronouns. It was the same draft I had seen already, the page full of my corrections and suggestions, advice I feel obligated to give even unpromising student work. You corrected so much, he said, but you didn't correct the most important mistake. I looked down at the page and then up again, confused; I don't see it, I said, what did I miss? He leaned across the table, reaching his arms toward the page that his upper body rested on the lacquered wood, a peculiarly teenage gesture, I thought, I remembered making it but haven't made it for years, and he pressed his finger to the margin of the page. Here, he said, pointing to a line where the single word She appeared, I made it here and it happens several times, the pronouns are all wrong, and even in his half-prone posture I could see that his whole body was tense. Ah, I said, looking up at him from the page, I see, and then he leaned quickly back, as if released by something, and as though after his revelation he wanted to reassert some space between us. I leaned back too, and pushed the pages across to him again; it was clear that they had served their purpose.