[from The Fatalist]
The best words get said frequently—they are like fertile pips.
Apples fall heavily to the ground and lie in the sun, their scent
abandoning them as a philosophy which cannot be further perfected. Love
releases playful sensations even from serious things providing a life
to think about. Take R—the only thing
R could credit herself with was having lived
her life and so she not only kept an account of it
but did so not in the privacy of a diary but in the form of letters
—abundant, profligate, indiscrete—that I want to write
to you so as to note something that I read
this morning: “It’s not that this or that means something
to me but this!—or that!—means something to me.” Musically
R bequeaths herself to posterity as a scholar might
bequeath his or her library blowing twisted veils of rain
past the narrow and curving windows in the last hour that will carry us along
to the time when those who come after us will learn
what we know—a man with a mustache waxed and dyed
green, a line of tall people and a woman at the door, a committee
of children without scooters but not mournful, a poet with a motive, a pilot
with a flashlight, a sulking but fascinated scholar, and Goethe no doubt
for whom R would have released a flock of red canaries.
