This was gruesome—fighting over a ham sandwich with one of the tiny cats of Rome, he leaped on my arm and half hung on to the food and half hung on to my shirt and coat. I tore it apart and let him have his portion, I think I lifted him down, sandwich and all, on the sidewalk and sat with my own sandwich beside him, maybe I petted his bony head and felt him shiver. I have
I went over the other day to pick up my daughter. her mother came out with workman’s overalls on. I gave her the child support money and she laid a sheaf of poems on me by one Manfred Anderson. I read them.
All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids, Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather, Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron Stood and beheld me.
Then to me so lying awake a vision Came without sleep over the seas and touched me, Softly touched mine eyelids and lips; and I too, Full of the vision,
Saw the white implacable Aphrodite, Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled Shine as fire of sunset on western waters; Saw the reluctant
“Speak! speak! thou fearful guest! Who, with thy hollow breast Still in rude armor drest, Comest to daunt me! Wrapt not in Eastern balms, But with thy fleshless palms Stretched, as if asking alms, Why dost thou haunt me?”
Then, from those cavernous eyes Pale flashes seemed to rise, As when the Northern skies Gleam in December; And, like the water’s flow Under December’s snow,
On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me; she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her. I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptation to Exist—and notice her glancing up from hers to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is, becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t moved, she’s allowed herself to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.) She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away; she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive, achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.
I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more, but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite: a memory—a girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school now, our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean,
Her tombstone told when she died. Her two surnames stopped me still. A virgin married at rest. She married in this pouring place, That I struck one day by luck, Before I heard in my mother's side Or saw in the looking-glass shell The rain through her cold heart speak
Comment form: