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ruins


we build ourselves


Second grade? third?-I can not quite remember how early it was: there was a fellow student in a grade-school class, I remember his name: Homer Buck.
He wrote stories, I remember, about firemen.  I remember suspecting (or even supposing) that he was more intelligent than I. I remember going with
several classmates, taking flowers, to the hospital where (I was not yet aware) he was dying.


dream  In the métro, I drop my ticket, and though I pick it up immediately, it is no longer a pass, but an ordinary green ticket, good only for a single ride, one-way.


in the Old Testament:  no word for body


A common hallucination:  invited to sit down, in the chair offered someone else is already sitting.


A good death, you say, which came suddenly, unawares.  He had been reading, but his eyes were closed, which means he had dropped off, gone without knowing.  If I question whether that is really best, you bring up cases of long illness, prolonged suffering, hopeless slow degeneration. Unquestionably better, his quick unconscious end.


and though the same
house, the house
once claimed, as


ever


the house is
lost


once entered
lived in


still lived in

lost


Characters die-their death told, funeral described-and then, at the next soirée, they arrive as always, by the usual train, say the sort of thing they say on such occasions, play their part in the long sentences that give them their existence.


It may be that Homer Buck's stories of firemen-replete with ladders, hoses, rescue-held the first words ever to register with me as the right words. It
was as if the sentences could not be other than they were, as if what was said could not be unsaid.


I hardly knew him.


Perhaps the first words I ever heard as words.


hollow
body, hole, the body's
hollow


something around
nothing, nothing inter-
leaving

desolate places


Sailing, he comes to an island, small and rugged but-green with grass or moss and littered with shells-a relief on this harborless voyage over endless seas.  He casts his anchor and steps ashore.


Alas, the seeming shore turns out to be, not land, but the back of a colossal fish, or whale, which plunges now and he is in the turbulent, still endless, sea...


songs (strength) in the night


flesh in pain, the soul mourns


This must have started with a nightmare that I don't remember.  Waking, I was already up-although I did not recall getting out of bed-in some strange apartment, and in the dark.  I was trying to locate the bathroom and trying to think what, or whose, place I was in.  I couldn't find the light.


As my need became more urgent, I stumbled naked through unlit rooms until a tiny green light became visible on a table I had bumped into.  I recognized it-the light on my computer.  ...In which case, I was home and it was easy, even in the dark, to find the bathroom. Rosmarie had awakened, but we both slept then, without explanation.  The next day, she told me that after I came back to bed she dreamt of wandering through a strange building, no idea where or what it was, no notion of why she was there.


no longer
thinkable, space, no
more


comes not into nor
goes out of


there, back, in
mind, no
space

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