72
PARTISAN REVIEW
tropolis of illuminations balconied, reflected, glimmering, win–
dowed in the frames of casements . More than once I saw the
boomerang land near its intent owner, wood against earth.
Sometimes he seemed to be launching the whole bagful before pro–
ceeding to retrieve. What was his method? He would pick one
boomerang up with another or with his foot. One afternoon I must
have been early, I was leaving as he arrived; I wanted to know how
he started doing this, because we had boomerangs in Brooklyn
Heights before the War in a dead end street looking out from a city
cliff to the docks and New York harbor and the Statue, and we
hurled our preplastic boomerangs out over the street that ran below
that cliff and thought of nothing, not people below, not the windows
of apartment houses. I looked this foreign boomerang-thrower in the
eye, his the angular face of a hunter looking out for danger, a blue
knitted cap, old blue sweatshirt with the hood back like mine . What
was he doing off work at four? The things in the bag were alive, their
imaginary kite strings resilient.
I come from a city also great, also both beautiful and dark, its
people also both abrupt and not distant; and I wanted to (as
Baudelaire says) "accost" this boomerang man . However, I could not
find the French for what I had to say, remembering that at least in
my own language I would know better what I had to say when I
began to say it. Once I had lost one of his boomerangs in the dusk,
but the man himself seemed not to have lost it, although I never saw
it land and I heard a sound in the trees near my head.
The French for all I wanted to say, I found in a dream, and
there, I think, it stayed. I lived, during those first weeks, alone, con–
sciously located between the light and darkness of living
with
some–
one . This person, sometimes mythical, later materialized as if she
had never gone away, perhaps because I was the one who had gone.
But in those weeks before American Thanksgiving, reaching toward
Frost's "darkest evening of the year," dreams found their way to my
new door and, unlike the daytime clients of the rare stamp dealer
(though his metal plate ENTREZ SANS FRAPPER was all I know
of them or him, apart from what I knew of the subject matter of his
business, not to mention a slow leak from a water-pressure valve in
my kitchen which I heard nothing from him about), my dreams were
by contrast both inside my apartment before I knew it and outside
knocking like an unknown neighbor in the middle of the night.
At least once during my first dreams, the man with the
boomerangs threw them all so that they did not come back. Two
