546
PARTISAN REVIEW
scratch the frostflowers off the window, curse the north wind, frozen
ground and snow and all drink instant brew. By midweek we
become restless and try to masturbate, but the wind is too cold out
here.
In
the afternoons, the longest stretch of the work day, we think
of our only friend who had an accident or is away abroad, wish our
colleagues to death, become more inattentive with every grip, and
then die ourselves perhaps . At home we have become too stupid for
our children, at our arrival can't stand their voices or the way they
move, send them too early to bed, then kneel down on the kitchen
floor before our women, lean our heads against them, and tell of our
infinitely unresolvable hostility to all authority and of the endless
loneliness, cry our hearts out and disappear into the tavern. We've
got to take it just a few more years, we keep saying to each other
every day, a few decades. A few more tumblings of the earth are still
ahead of us till we can walk from house to tree from tree to path,
from path to village, and from the village back to the house with no
one putting us on notice . We have to show a few more limbs muti–
lated by accidents or illness before the word "deadbeat" isn't used
against us any more . A few more years, a few more decades . But
even if we are not friends , we, too , are in a state of waiting and we
continue to assert ourselves as riddles, and none of you opinion and
behavior mongers see us. We are the figures walking in the distance
through the fields , the silhouettes in the cross-country bus which
drives through the snow-plain . Our shadowy faces fill the first to the
last subway car and only in the curves do our eyes briefly lose touch .
Sometimes we can address the distant mountains, and sometimes
even be there on the horizon in the blue between two mountain
ranges-as the gulch there, and the walls of rock . Once a day per–
haps we wink hello down in the grass and are the sunlamp in the
thicket, the net of light in the copper beach as well as the protective
darkness inside the yew wood bush. Again and again we can be the
root wind that suddenly lifts tree crowns from below, the soughing of
night and day, the unending green, the calm gleaming ocean surface
which the proverb calls "Galena." Tomorrow maybe we'll be noth–
ing. Day after tomorrow we'll be interred and not even be a footnote
in the history books . But the white cloud graves high above will
always be our shrines . We are the fatherless, who have been set free,
lack a legitimate homeland, are bracketed out of our places, the
beautiful strangers, the great unknowns, the soulfully slow, the peo–
ple of all time . Thus we use the power of the riddle . This evening, let
us embody the craft that we have actually learned and whose mem-
