#36

The salutation was unfinished. Even the dateline was puzzled. Mnemosyne's children scattered, disappeared through beautiful views of doors. The ideal exception. I had sent them on a quest. My own time was counted in pages, the laborer's diet of love. Four long hours, as Bryan would say. For hours and hours and hours. And if I wanted, as I seldom do, with that fallacy to penetrate, always lurid interruption...

Ah, but that muse too has departed. No interest nor rhythm there. For once, I am wholly my own, my genius shut up in a crystal cage and entrusted to a friend. Hide it, I told Lucas, in an imaginary land. And leave no marker for history to swallow. All so many fantasies dispersing, uplifting anchor from the real. I drink my tea, lift books from shelves and study. My life is a tunnel of brackets, my epoch an epoche.

And you whom I speak to on phones, whom I shop with or dine with or laugh with, whom I update in letters sent digitally, whom I flee from with parting lips and tongue, whom I look for and remember: you become in their absence hazy, and your meaning even less than the shades caught sight of in darkness, yearning. Ever longing to drink from what enlivens the living for living.