The boys scarce neither seek nor hide. Unduly bonnet-bowing, sinewed— lash-laced, moth-wood pinafores (as in certain cautionary tales they crushingly are called). Ecce my own nervy threadbare, darting over mothwick panels oblivious of pantaloon, hermaphrodite subtext— indolence, squalid, like there were skirmishes I might never have forgotten. As it was out today went smooth, we squirmed, then leavened defensive rejoinders, ballet of a heavy toe. Just sherbert mountain calligraphy, pistachio in the horizon, as though sherbert scoops could ever winnow out of cold such insistent, timid shapes. I am a vowel upside down, the mountain says. I might well turn over without repercussions. My underside either is or is not a geode infinity of pastel. Otherwise we’re headed toward inversion of landscape as retreat from peacocks, laughing thrush, verso of which is vanilla bean dropping seeds behind vanilla canvas. And who, returning from verso, this juggernaut of bliss exceeding species. Dodos, we guess, and cranes surmised capable midflight of seeming purely textual, indistinguishable from the guano that really proves their fluency in several spaces. Are these birds or are they blots, the Darwinism of looking painterly as whooping both from and toward our lonely idyll. Our one and only, berries were their wearing, inedible. And some bygone Enoshima Strether, pondside, placid conundra of reciprocities, a sense that romance at some future moment benefitted from a kick in the pants. And the sherbert only calls attention to the unexplained absense of Vivian girls, not that we needed warfare—not that so nuts a form of principle could distract from the warfare of cranes, less flying than hoping not to fall further into foreground. The edges of our bargain landscape were fluffed, all silver rush left poofing to their own devices. We truly were in good company, so much left unpainted and all, as though my thirty-five dollar folding screen were trying to teach a lesson. And verily you were saying something in a dialect of which not even you had a firm grasp, it only being at this point we notice the delicate sword-bearer, stage-right, knowing, like most cupids, to arrive full-quiver, extent to which he had some serious explaining to do. Or was it a koto, a net for butterflies. Ki-cho, sujibosi, halos crumbling delicately to the touch, trying not to look too flittingly anxious about having misplaced their respective saints. Yonder garnets left behind a broken pomegranate, and islets were willing to fold into water as viciously pale and holding as a mother not knowing what else in such a context she might do. Red-handed and fire-mouthed, she folds me in it.
Allez, allez, I leave a radio like a light on for my return from campus the way Mrs. Snediker left Katie Couric velveteening for the golden retrievers who might well prefer less Katie more quiet, all the more so as hours melt the morning, Katie becoming more nasal, less paid television friend versions of herself. I like returning to my radio friends. In lieu of dogs I dote on this ghoulish sadness that cares beyond itself, punctiliously, about Katie Couric’s heels; it astounds me upon my return that the ghoulish sadness can be so dire when it comes to the world’s hostile, dubious relation to my buoyance, but out of nowhere is oh wow, those shoes. The things on which it has opinions. Gay sadness, the leashes I give. That’s the sadness, the radio in part being on for it, to keep it occupied in my absence; ditto my returns from campus, suggesting without much strain that I am the ghoulish sadness, lonely and the occasion of loneliness all at once; I can’t bear the quiet, antsiness moving quickly to the narcissism of really liking the sadness in its reflection without realizing it in fact is reflection, bracketing whatever psychoanalysis says about the jubilance of this specular moment, and when I return from teaching, the radio is playing one of my favorites, a Mendellsohn concerto, the one where Felix is throwing plates at Cécile Jeanrenaud, and then at the surprising tail end of a Tempo semplice, he accuses her in English of never truly having communicated the extent of her loyalty. She insists in broken German she thought her loyalty a given. At which point all of her languages break, she riffles through them for one that seems fluent, but duress has made fluency itself the thing that is missing. If only I were articulate slipping (fluently) into if only I were fluent, if only I were graceful, or does this mean if only he a bit more were grateful. The radio, she can’t stand, she doesn’t even understand radios, their being beyond her time, even as her predicament requires technologies she can barely conjure. Sometimes I leave the radio on as a nostalgic technology, the sort of thing that might have assuaged someone many decades previous, to the extent that this could trick the ghoulish sadness into believing if not its own anti-macassar quaintness than its kitsch factor which would be the first step in my learning to take it less seriously. And so the radio. And of course as I teach I’m distracted, Poor Cécile, the world being unkind, what can she say to assuage her husband’s sense that things get more brittle as each attempt at lubrication or leavening ends up freaking things out. We needed out-moded technologies to convince us that the things they solved weren’t beyond our ken, or what several decades ago we nonironically called cutting edge. Solitude, like music, arrived as movement and directive. This loneliness was allegro, this one subito. And as I turn the key with real and dirty fantasies of contact, of ceramic projectile, another plate remembers crashes.
MICHAEL SNEDIKER