MICHAEL BRODSKY
227
was the absence of
L.
or the memory of her strange words and gestures
that made me unsure of myself. I needed F. She was my compass, h er
north pole my jugular.
It
was clear she couldn't run the garden, I
taught her phrases that might aid her in her labors, might make the
garden stand still for her instead of riding its stakes into adjacent bogs.
Buoyed up by the sudden sense of what I could do for her in her exi le, I
was assaulted by the following phrase: I am the fertility of her garden,
and also its feculence. The phrase comforted me, it appropriated all
polarities. But after the phrase is over I am again in the middle,
somewhere between the antipodes. Between rage and submission,
between self-congratulation and effacement, falls the shadow. In the
between I am paralyzed. When I repeated a phrase like crop rotation
seasonally it ceased
to
make sense. I mean, while I was saying it, the
farthest thing from my mind, from my grasp, was what is commonly
understood by the phrase.
It
was only in speaking the phrase that I
evicted it from my precincts, I evicted it and what it denoted. What it
denoted no longer hovered, one more possibility that deflected me from
the end of all possibility that was my one hope. I went on repeating it,
as if repetition were the royal road to lucidity. For the duration of the
phrase I was the phrase, I was not so much communicating with her as
making a raid on the syllabary, extracting a pittance, dentist who
inflicts no pain. Just as for the duration of her looking up the skirts of
the tree she was the looking. But repetition made things worse. It did
not restore to me a clearer sense of the meaning of the word. For one
thing it exasperated her. She repeated the phrase. In her hands the
phrase went from the senseless to the ominous. It was as if she had
picked up something I hadn't intended. Some nuance. We fucked in
the garden. Fucking relieved us of our rage. It was as if we were
performing for a third party, the garden itself, rodents that hid in the
shrubs, who knows. What is certain is that the defiance of our thrusts,
our heaves, was meant for more than each other. And when she tied me
up like an unwanted parcel with the neat ribbons of her thighs then I
knew she was proclaiming something, but what, and to whom? Did she
have her phantoms, too, with whom she achieved a feeble commerce
from time to time? I wanted to get to the core of the fucking, by eroding
the expendable layers of the act. But what were the expendable layers.
Every time we fucked it seemed as if the fucking were an impediment
on the way to the real fucking, way of passing the time until the
opportune occasion showed its face. In that way I stitched a future for
myself, from the mucky twigs of expectation, for her too, if she wanted
to share it, and look forward with me, like me, to that perfect fucking
