I wish I knew what my dreams were for. I wish I could define them. They seem to be a form of thought or some kind of illusion of reality. Certainly they are a source of intense emotion, so probably they protect me from what I really feel, which would be too painful to endure. In Paris, when I sleep late like a newborn baby, I say to myself, justifying my laziness, This is good for my brain and immune system. When I sleep, I roll over on my side and grab a big, soft feather pillow. This is a sign that I’m dreaming, like paws and whiskers moving about on a cat, or a dog whining and rolling its eyes back behind closed lids. I hope Paris will always be a stable place in terms of the quality and quantity of my sleep. I think this is a compensation for the little, banal degradations of everyday life. Sleep is, in part, my idea of beauty. I have tried to write about it in my poem “To Sleep”:
Then out of the darkness leapt a bare hand
that stroked my brow, “Come along, child;
stretch out your feet under the blanket.
Darkness will give you back, unremembering.
Do not be afraid.” So I put down my book
and pushed like a finger through sheer silk,
the autobiographical part of me, the am,
snatched up to a different place, where I was
no longer my body but something more—
the compulsive, disorderly parts of me
in a state of equalization, everything sliding off—
war, suicide, love, poverty—as the rebellious,
mortal I, I, I lay, like a beetle penetrating a rose,
my red thoughts in a red shade all I was.
YESTERDAY, I took a thermal photograph of my friend and translator Claire Malroux. I was looking at her the way a creature would look at her in the night on a street in the fifteenth arrondissement, where she lives. Animals have thermal receptors in their eyes that enable them to detect heat sources from a distance. Seeing Claire like this reminded me of when I was sixteen and took opiates that were too strong for my young mind, so I lay in bed for three days like a creature in a coma. I find I do not want or need to see the heat sources of the people I love, as a serpent sees them. I do not have to see the way a barn owl, a rat, or a moth sees in the dark because of the special rods in their eyes. In the backs of my eyes, I have a bright tapestry of human blood vessels. That’s why they are red when I am photographed with a flashbulb. I do not want to lose this human dimension, even after my good strong chin is gone and I live like a gargoyle in a nursing home, smelling of urine, feces, and other secretions.
Because much of what I hope to achieve is still before me, I am always aspiring to say something true in an atmosphere of beauty (beauty again!), connecting my inner and outer space. I think that as long as I have this inner dimension I will want to create something out of language to reveal what is there—in particular, the ghastly, insane, and cruel things. Perhaps poetry is a kind of thermal photography of man in the world.
TODAY A MAN was weeping next to me at the brasserie. He was young and drinking a Coke with a lemon slice bobbing in it. Every few minutes he wiped the tears from his cheeks and looked at me apologetically. He was wearing snug denim pants and his sideburns were neatly trimmed. Had he seen his future in the bar mirror, I wondered? Had his young body, by unfair election, been touched by the incurable virus that has touched so many in my lifetime? Did he need a doctor? I was not at all prepared to encounter him, like a figure from the Old Testament under olive trees, with the scent of rosemary or lavender in the air. He seemed to float somewhere between heaven and earth. Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Noah, and Adam were in the distance, back behind him. In the mirror, the sunshine made strange, flame-like wing patterns. On his table, a little bouquet of colorful posies made flames, too. He seemed super real to me, because there was nothing unreal about him or his sorrow. I wanted to speak to him but was afraid. We were both alone, and waiters hurried past, ignoring us. The young man had moist green eyes, like rough emeralds. Outside, in the square, a big scarred plane tree was shaking its branches. On the horizon, swollen clouds moved quickly. Nearby, on the pavement, a crow pushed its yellow beak into a seeping pink trash bag. I ordered a bowl of wild strawberries, which are in season, and took out my notebook and pen, because I didn’t know what else to do. Why do the gods make a sport of their play with us? We are all born in a womb and end up in a tomb, I wrote down.
Part XII
WHEN THE GERMAN POET Rilke arrived in Paris, in 1902, he was so unhappy that he wrote, “Sometimes I lean my head against the gate of the Luxembourg just to breathe in a little space, calmness, moonlight—but there, too, it’s the same leaden air, still heavy with the perfume of the too many
