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The page says the past is held together by love and hatred at once, and that its whole discourse is both durable and brief.

It reads like a compressed thesis about memory. The past is `sure / and sound and old,` but it is also bound up with conflicting feeling and with the fact that time is short. The page is small, but it opens a major theme for the collection: how memory keeps authority even when it cannot stay stable.

A compact thesis on memory: 'This is the way the past is written. Sure / and sound and old. Linked with love and / hated in its discourse, a similarity of / time, so short as well.' The past is granted authority - 'Sure / and sound and old' - even as it is bound up with contradictory feeling and the brevity of time. The typewritten page reads as a small ars poetica of history-as-composition, and is scan-confirmed accurate.