But why are you lost to me and I alive?
Ellen—what is this, that reaches round us and never arrives; what is this that promises return?
Ours was a proper departure, landing us on the Italian shore, love in a town of disinterested people.
Perhaps I want the impossible: yes, yes, I want that time when we were there in Naples, when we strolled the seaside; when we sailed the waterlanes and walked Roman streets and her fountains watched us with sleepy eyes, spray beaded on some bronze arm.
I dislike borrowing things and yet I’m borrowing memories, borrowing time, those bronzes, our return, our boat bucking seas, sending us north, ice off the larboard, back to reality, debts, conniving. We said good-bye but our good-bye was postponement. Our wheel became St. Catherine’s. At a gypsy teller’s tent there was a kind of double silence.
I lived for my work, starved for it.
With my pen I quartered the earth and green pastures and made them live for her and the witchcraft of hope, to shake off sadness and burst the anarchies of soul.
Incorrect to heaven, some say.
