After twenty minutes he put the poem aside to contemplate his latest idea. He opened the notebook. The piano. Love, memory, harm. But the detective had been there too. In his presence privacy had been violated. An innocent pact between thought and page, idea and hand, had been ruptured. Or polluted. An intruder, a hostile presence had made him dismissive of his own phrasing. He was forced to read himself through another’s eyes and struggle against a likely misreading. Self-consciousness was the death of a notebook.
