MICHAEL BRODSKY
215
sleep as a circle, a closed circle. Now I was hungry for sentences, now,
when I was not a little bit paralyzed by all that was and wasn't being
said about me. Or rather, I was less hungry for sentences than sentences
were hungry for me, I became a culture medium, like a polluted stream.
Phenomena incised me, sentences fed the fissures a little distance. Every
time I opened my eyes I was incised. For who was there to tell me there
was nothing to be afraid of from a gibbous moon or a too emphatic
furrow in a willow 's trunk or a housewife's smile worn at a rakish
angle. Slowly I began to react to nothing, nothing impinged. That was
as frightening as everything impinging. I was trapped with the ghosts
of sentences inside me. My subject matter, my. world, became her
silence, her refusal to report. She varied her manner of refusal. One day
a shrug, another a smile. I could not speak. I could not make sentences.
Sometimes I regained myoid state of excitement, when everything
impinged. I was terrified enough by a squirrel, a half-empty glass, a
shiver, to invent a sentence. I was relieved for a moment, immunized
against all further impinging, or the need to register all further
impinging. I was the surface of the water boiling when the heat is
turned off at last. There was a terrible need to sequester the sentence
that protected me. I had to protect it in turn, preserve it. No further
sentence must dislodge it. These quick sentences cut me off from the
commingling in the chaos of my depths, cut off whatever they regis–
tered, caught on the wing from that commingling, where is brewed the
future sentence, the unpredictable future sentence. But I was afraid of
that sentence, it might annihilate me the way a flash of lightning
annihilates the firmament.
Were they luring her away from me. She said at last she could not
bear to speak about what went on behind closed doors. And about what
goes on between spread thighs. But I kept my suspicions to myself. She
could not bear to think about the impression she was making on them.
She preferred to think, as she left them every day, she made no
impression at all. When she spoke to them sr.e lost all consciousness of
time and place. She was in another element.
If
she accepted the fact she
made an impression, an inroad that th ey were the repository of the
impression she made, then she would be incapable of separating herself
from them.
In
their presence she was real.
In
the intervals between
visits she merely postponed coincidence with her self. But she was
changing a little. At first she soothed herself they did not exist in her
absence or if they did exist they forgot about her entirely. But now she
admitted things about herself more freely, without feeling embalmed
in the utterance.
In
a part of herself she wanted to sink into the
