I could tell Marco was a woman-hater, because in spite of all the models and TV starlets in the room that night he paid attention to nobody but me. Not out of kindness or even curiosity, but because I’d happened to be dealt to him, like a playing card in a pack of identical cards.
I don’t know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely.
It was inestimably important for me to look at the lights of Amherst town in the rain, with the wet black tree-skeletons against the limpid streetlights and gray November mist, and then look at the boy beside me and feel all the hurting beauty go flat because he wasn’t the right one-not at all.
All through June the writing course had stretched before me like a bright, safe bridge over the dull gulf of summer. Now I saw it totter and dissolve, and a body in a white blouse and green skirt plummet into the gap.
Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
I’ll call you. Take care.” And he was gone. So the rain comes down hard outside my room, and like Eddie Cohen,” I say, “... fifteen thousand years – – – of what? We’re still nothing but animals.
Fixed stars govern a life.
People and trees receded on either hand like the dark sides of a tunnel as I hurtled on to the still, bright point at the end of it, the pebble at the bottom of the well, the white sweet baby cradled in its mother’s belly.
The eyes and the faces all turned themselves towards me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.
I thought it would be the way I’d feel if I ever visited Europe. I’d come home, and if I looked closely into the mirror I’d be able to make out a little white Alp at the back of my eye. Now I thought that if I looked closely into the mirror I’d see a doll-size Constantin sitting in my eye and smiling out at me.
Always him. Damn, what is the matter with me? Is it because I want somebody to orient myself about that I’m drawn to him, or am I drawn to him because he is exactly the sort of person I want to orient myself about?
Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.
Why is it that I find it so difficult to accept the present moment, whole as an apple, without cutting and hacking at it to find a purpose, or setting it up on a shelf with other apples to measure its worth or trying to pickle it in brine to preserve it, and crying to find it turns all brown and is no longer simply the lovely apple I was given in the morning?
I thought I only need tell him what I wanted to, and that I could control the picture he had of me by hiding this and revealing that, all the while he thought he was so smart.
The balled Pulp of your heart Confronts its small Mill of silence.
And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle – beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.
I stepped from the air-conditioned compartment onto the station platform, and the motherly breath of the suburbs enfolded me. It smelt of lawn sprinklers and station wagons and tennis rackets and dogs and babies.
Everywhere, imperceptibly or otherwise, things are passing, ending, going. And there will be other summers, other band concerts, but never this one, never again, never as now. Next year I will not be the self of this year now. And that is why I laugh at the transient, the ephemeral; laugh, while clutching, holding, tenderly, like a fool his toy, cracked glass, water through fingers.
Tireless, tied, as a moon-bound sea Moves.
So I bandaged the cut, packed up my Gillette blades and caught the eleven-thirty bus to Boston.