MICHAEL BRODSKY
225
after I said, I do not feel need, was proof not that I was capable of
invoking the opposite of what I said but that I was at a precarious
distance from the world, inner and outer. I knew no more about my
feelings than about whether the man beneath the streetlamp would
attack me once I exited from the manor. And yet the fact that I
trafficked with myself in such strategems was proof I was dull witted in
regard at least
to
my inner states. I fear, my confusion, my chaos,
antedated all strategems. They were the background if on ly I could
have channelled all my confusion into the manufacture of universes
where all was sti ll , where all was the calm evicted by a chaos beyond for
once my ken. I had to get away from Livia for awhi le.
I went back to Fall one evening. I heard a chi ld say, She is planting
radishes instead of onions. The break in her habit must be a prayer
fringed with feverish expectation. For she had renounced onions and
the sense of security their luminous bulbs afforded. And she was
entitled to a reward. I must be the reward. Then she missed me. I found
her in the garden , looking up at her tree, like a sparrow. But was she
reverential or appraising. That I would never know, that wou ld go the
way of all ambiguities. She was measuring the distance between her
and its summit. Or planning her ascent, having already determined the
distance or quite indifference to the distance. She was beyond the stage
of perceiving anything. I was so tired at that moment, I wanted to sink
into her arms, forget my colleagues, my co-tenants, even
L.
persecutors
all masquerading as the persecuted, gazes glazed with brutish defiance
and even more brutish self-righteousness. But she sneered. Fumes rose
from afar, incisions into the foliage, the fumes themselves a kind of
foliage upon the sky. She wondered why I set such store by the varying
grimaces of her routine. She had a right to radishes. I could not explain
how she had trained me, over epochs, to the delirious misinterpreta–
tions of her signs. My training was now an object of ridicule too.
I wanted to engulf her and instead became a puddle to reflect h er
rays. She penetrated to my depths, I sang for the supper of h er
penetration. I wanted her to revile me for having abandoned her in the
dead of winter, in the heat of the defense. She penetrated to my depths, I
say, but perhaps I am confusing her with others, who left their insignia
on all my acts, even those sti ll gestating. And my acts, like my
infirmities, were always undergoing several stages at once. The only
way I got through their beginning was to anticipate their extinction,
mime its motions in advance. So it is understable I was confused about
where my prowess lay, if I indeed had any, and whether repeated failure
was due to ineptitude or impatience, or scrupulosity of the most
