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it wasn’t possible any longer to stare at heaven and not be destroyed.
Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you. I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again in the cold light of earliest spring— afraid, yes, but among you again crying yes risk joy in the raw wind of the new world.
You wanted to be born; I let you be born. When has my grief ever gotten in the way of your pleasure? Plunging ahead into the dark and light at the same time eager for sensation as though you were some new thing, wanting to express yourselves all brilliance, all vivacity never thinking this would cost you anything, never imagining the sound of my voice as anything but part of you— you won’t hear it in the other world, not clearly again, not in birdcall or human cry, not the clear sound, only persistent echoing
in all sound that means goodbye, goodbye— the one continuous line that binds us to each other.
the powerful are always lied to since the weak are always driven by panic.
I see it is with you as with the birches: I am not to speak to you in the personal way. Much has passed between us. Or was it always only on the one side? I am at fault, at fault, I asked you to be human—I am no needier than other people. But the absence of all feeling, of the least concern for me—I might as well go on addressing the birches, as in my former life: let them do their worst, let them bury me with the Romantics, their pointed yellow leaves falling and covering me.
It was not meant to last forever in the real world. But why admit that, when you can go on doing what you always do, mourning and laying blame, always the two together. I don’t need your praise to survive. I was here first, before you were here, before you ever planted a garden. And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon are left, and the sea, and the wide field. I will constitute the field.
What is my heart to you that you must break it over and over like a plantsman testing his new species? Practice on something else:
FIELD FLOWERS
The great thing is not having a mind. Feelings: oh, I have those; they govern me. I have a lord in heaven called the sun, and open for him, showing him the fire of my own heart, fire like his presence. What could such glory be if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters, were you like me once, long ago, before you were human? Did you permit yourselves to open once, who would never open again? Because in truth I am speaking now the way you do. I speak because I am shattered.
MATINS
I try to win you back, that is the point of the writing. But you are gone forever, as in Russian novels, saying a few words I don’t remember—
How lush the world is, how full of things that don’t belong to me— I watch the blossoms shatter, no longer pink, but old, old, a yellowish white— the petals seem to float on the bright grass, fluttering slightly.
What a nothing you were, to be changed so quickly into an image, an odor— you are everywhere, s...
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Time to rest now; you have had enough excitement for the time being. Twilight, then early evening. Fireflies in the room, flickering here and there, here and there, and summer’s deep sweetness filling the open window. Don’t think of these things anymore. Listen to my breathing, your own breathing like the fireflies, each small breath a flare in which the world appears. I’ve sung to you long enough in the summer night. I’ll win you over in the end; the world can’t give you this sustained vision. You must be taught to love me. Human beings must be taught to love silence and darkness.
Why do you call it rigidity? Can’t you call it a taste for ceremony? Or is your hunger for beauty completely satisfied by your own person?
But is waiting forever always the answer? Nothing is always the answer; the answer depends on the story. Such a mistake to want clarity above all things. What’s a single night, especially one like this, now so close to ending? On the other side, there could be anything, all the joy in the world, the stars fading, the streetlight becoming a bus stop.
The night isn’t dark; the world is dark. Stay with me a little longer. Your hands on the back of the chair— that’s what I’ll remember. Before that, lightly stroking my shoulders. Like a man training himself to avoid the heart.
Apparently, after so many years, you need distance to make plain its intensity. Your hands on the chair, stroking my body and the wood in exactly the same way. Like a man who wants to feel longing again, who prizes longing above all other emotion.
And before that, you are holding me because you are going away— these are statements you are making, not questions needing answers. How can I know you love me unless I see you grieve over me?
When I was a child looking at my parents’ lives, you know what I thought? I thought heartbreaking. Now I think heartbreaking, but also insane. Also very funny.
MARINA
You were everything to me, not just beauty and money. When we made love the cat went to another bedroom. Then you forgot me. Not for no reason did the stones tremble around the walled garden: there’s nothing there now except the wildness people call nature, the chaos that takes over. You took me to a place where I could see the evil in my character and left me there.
When you see her again, tell her this is how a god says goodbye: if I am in her head forever I am in your life forever.
Watching you
ostensibly working hard while actually doing the worst job possible, I think you are a small irritating purple thing and I would like to see you walk off the face of the earth
because you are all that’s wrong with my life and I need you and I claim you.
UNWRITTEN LAW Interesting how we fall in love: in my case, absolutely. Absolutely, and, alas, often— so it was in my youth. And always with rather boyish men— unformed, sullen, or shyly kicking the dead leaves: in the manner of Balanchine. Nor did I see them as versions of the same thing. I, with my inflexible Platonism, my fierce seeing of only one thing at a time: I ruled against the indefinite article. And yet, the mistakes of my youth made me hopeless, because they repeated themselves, as is commonly true. But in you I felt something beyond the archetype— a true expansiveness, a buoyance
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gradually taught me the meaninglessness of that term.
She believes in the Virgin the way I believe in the mountain, though in one case the fog never lifts. But each person stores his hope in a different place. I make my soup, I pour my glass of wine.
