890
PARTISAN REVIEW
which
all
one could distinguish were the well-worn bits of the major
and minor poets I imitated. Years later, in the squalid suburb of a
foreign town, I remember seeing a fence, the boards of which had
been brought from some other place where they had been used, ap–
parently, as the enclosure of an itinerant circus. Animals had been
painted on it by a versatile barker, but whoever had removed the
boards and then knocked them together again, must have been blind
or insane, for now the fence showed only disjointed parts of animals
(some of them, moreover, upside down)-a tawny haunch, a zebra's
head, the leg of an elephant.
In the physical plan, my intense labors were marked by a number
of dim actions or postures, such as walking, sitting, lying. Each of
these broke again into fragments of no spatial importance: at the
walking stage, for instance, I might be wandering one moment in
the depths of the park and the next pacing the rooms of the house.
Or, to take the sitting stage, I would suddenly become aware that a
plate of something I could not even remember having sampled was
being removed and that my mother, her left cheek twitching as it
did whenever she worried, was narrowly observing from her place
at the top of the long table my moodiness and lack of appetite. I
would lift my head to explain-but the table had gone, and I was
sitting alone on a roadside stump, the stick of my butterfly net, in
metronomic motion, drawing arc after arc on the brownish sand:
earthen rainbows with variations in depth of stroke rendering the
different colors.
When I was irrevocably committed to finish my poem or die,
there came the most trance-like state of all. With hardly a twinge
of surprise, I found myself, of all places, on a leathern couch in the
cold, musty, little-used room that had been my grandfather's study.
On that couch I lay prone, in a kind of reptilian freeze, one arm
dangling, so that my knuckles touched the floral figures of the carpet.
When next I came out of that trance, the greenish flora was still
there, my arm was still dangling, but now I was prostrate on the
edge of a rickety wharf, and the water-lilies I touched were real,
and the undulating plump shadows of alder-foliage on the water–
apotheosized inkblots, oversized amoebas-were rhythmically palpi–
tating, extending and drawing in dark pseudopods, which, when con–
tracted, would break at their rounded margins into elusive and fluid
