le cygne noir

She said, I love you.
He said, Nothing.

(As if there were just one of each word
and the one who used it, used it up).

In the history of language
the first obscenity was silence. ”

I had drawn my chair to the hotel window, to watch the rain.

I was in a kind of dream or trance—
in love, and yet
I wanted nothing.

It seemed unnecessary to touch you, to see you again.
I wanted only this:
the room, the chair, the sound of the rain falling,
hour after hour, in the warmth of the spring night.

I needed nothing more; I was utterly sated.
My heart had become small; it took very little to fill it.
I watched the rain falling in heavy sheets over the darkened city—

You were not concerned; I could let you
live as you needed to live.

At dawn the rain abated. I did the things
one does in daylight, I acquitted myself,
but I moved like a sleepwalker.

It was enough and it no longer involved you.
A few days in a strange city.
A conversation, the touch of a strange hand.
And afterward, I took off my wedding ring.

That was what I wanted: to be naked.

 ”

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. ”

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities. ”

the snow doesn’t give a soft white
damn Whom it touches ”

Henry:

I did not mean to burn you yesterday—I was lying as in a dream—and so dissolved I could not hear you rising—I clung to a prolongation of that moment. When I think of it now I feel a kind of pain to have burned you—say that you forgive me—it was unconscious.

I can’t write to you, Henry, though I was awake last night telling you—all night—of that man I discovered yesterday … the man I sensed with my feelings the first moment—all the mountains of words, writings, quotations have sundered—I only know now the splendor, the blinding splendor of your room—and that unreal moment—how can a moment be at once so unreal and so warm—so warm.

There is so much you want to know. I remember your phrase: “Only whores appreciate me.” I wanted to say: you can only have blood-consciousness with whores, there is too much mind between us, too much literature, too much illusion—but then you denied there had been only mind…

My face makes you think that all my expectations go up, up … but you know now that it is not only my mind which is aware of you.

Aware of you, chaotically. I love this strange, treacherous softness of you which always turns to hatred. How did I single you out? I saw you with that intense selective way—I saw a mouth that was at once intelligent, animal, and soft … a strange mixture—a human man, sensitively aware of everything—I love awareness—a man, I told you, whom life made drunk. Your laughter was not a laughter which could hurt, it was mellow and rich. I felt warm, dizzy, and I sang within myself. You always said the truest and deepest things—slowly—and you have a way of saying, like a southerner—hem, hem—trailingly, while off on your own introspective journey—which touched me.

Just before that I had sought, as I told you, suicide. But I waited to meet you, as if that would solve something—and it did. When I saw you I thought, here is a man I could love. And I was no longer afraid of feelings. I couldn’t go through with the suicide (idea of killing off romanticism), something held me back. I can only move wholly.

(…) Henry, I too want to sit and write you a long time, as if it represented a closeness to you. I didn’t tell you the joy I felt at your return from Dijon, what a joy, acute, I feel when you act spontaneously as I do. And what a joy again when, in the center of the madness, you say unexpectedly something very deep, the sudden illuminations of living, the lantern never quite blown out—I love that too. Dark living and that awareness—I appreciate that—don’t you understand—like an intensification of all pleasures. I love the creator in you, too—who enriches and expands living in ways nobody else understands. I love the sincere and the insincere (I was delighted when you wrote me once and in the middle of the letter became aware it would make a preface!).
On se penetre non par les sensations mais par la pensée, I wonder.

 ”

In a haze of sunshine—sunshine projecting in vaporous shafts between the white boles of birches, drenching the pendulous foliage, trembling in eyelets upon the bark, dripping onto the long grass, shining and smoking among the ghosts of a racemose bird cherries in scumbled bloom—a Russian wildwood enveloped the rambler. ”

Driving home a little lit last night
(God protects drunks and Irish girls, right?)
this thought sideswiped me at a stoplight:

I don’t believe that love can last forever.
If I had to choose between safety and danger,
Gentle Reader, can you guess the answer?

Most nights I like the bed empty,
my arms a startled parenthesis.
(But should a spinster be this greedy?)

Will I always want to wake up alone?
Tonight, awakened by the shrill of the phone,
mistaking the twilight for the dawn,

I want a voice I’ve never heard
to speak in a language that has no word
for sadness. When will I learn?

 ”

so I have no problem telling you
why you cried over the third lost
metal or the mousetrap. I knew
that orgasms weren’t your fault
and that feeling of keeping solid
in yourself but wanting an ecstatic
black hole was just bad beauty.

Certain loves were perfect
in the daytime and had every
right to express carnally behind
the copy machine and there are
no hard feelings for the boozy
sodomy and sorry XX daisy chain,
whenever it felt right for you.

And when the moment of soft
levitation with erasing hands
made you feel dirty, like
the main person to think up love
in the first place, I knew that.
It’s okay, you’re an innocent
with the brilliance of an animal

stuffing yourself sick on a kill.
Don’t, don’t feel like the runt alien
on my ship: I get you. I know
the dimensions of your wishing
and losing and don’t think you
a glutton with petty beefs. But
even I, who know your triggers,

your emblematic sacs of sad fury,
I understand why the farthest fat trees
sliver down with your disappointment
and why the big sense of the world,
wrong before you, shrugs but
somewhere grasps your spinning,
stunning, alone. But you have me.

 ”

Why does one feel so different at night? Why is it so exciting to be awake when everybody else is asleep? Late—it is very late! And yet every moment you feel more and more wakeful, as though you were slowly, almost with every breath, waking up into a new, wonderful, far more thrilling and exciting world than the daylight one. And what is this queer sensation that you’re a conspirator? Lightly, stealthily you move about your room. You take something off the dressing-table and put it down again without a sound. And everything, even the bed-post, knows you, responds, shares your secret… ”

I feel as if I’m always on the verge of waking up. ”