MICHAEL BRODSKY
217
tors I was overwrought. How did I know she would not return to
announce her decision to stay, ally herself with them against my
infirmity. I walked quickly over the stony paths to her house. Grass
and twigs and sky they chiselled were impediments on the way to her
silence, her one long pregnant pause, and as impediments they were
transformed. They spoke, they assailed me, but in a new way, with a
new message. I collaborated with them. They were fecundated with the
sap of my impatience to arrive. My impatience was a symptom, in a
sense. My sentences began to mean something to me again. Until the
return itself, the long walk along stony paths, became the arena of my
torment, and not her silence. The trees, the little kingdoms among the
roots, the twigs overhead, were props on the stage of my journey. And
the only way to make props palatable is to bypass them. No longer her
silence, no longer the tasks for which it incapacitated me, for I could go,
on after she began speaking to me again only, but the long walk to that
silence. That the passing minutes, hours, converged on her return gave
them a momentum. But when I reached her I did not know what I was
doing. I coincided with the event for which I had been waiting,
coincidence abolished me.
I wanted to abolish my returns to her daily, so much did I live for
them. I couldn't wait to finish delivering in order to go to her, to hear
her tell me she had nothing to tell me. She was too tired, too worn out
with her defense. I wanted to leave her, leave the post office, get a head
start on a laborious eviction, leave that daily turmoil on stony paths.
But first I had to stop everything I was doing, do nothing, for a while. I
did not want to leave in the midst of activity. I would be only departing
what would compel retrieval later, when retrieval would be impossible.
I had to stop doing what I was doing and think about it, abolish my
need to do what I was doing. But I did what I did so that I did not have
to think about it: my job was the minimum of hubbub necessary to
camouflage a long joyless vigil. It was only later, in the twilight of
tasks, that I longed to be in the activity again. I had to stop and think
now so that later there would be no nostalgia. I would guard against
nostalgia in advance, desire for impossible return. I would focus on her
silence, on my stony path, no primrose path of dalliance that, and the
sun of my attention would shatter everything, as the noonday sun
shatters into wisps of tinsel the locust twigs that fissure the sky. All I
surveyed would share the fate of bare twigs at high noon. I cannot say I
ever got to know her better. But I have images, though they are
bleached enough to be the mere skeletons of words. Perhaps what
bleached them was the hunger for the words to annul them. I gave
