Any chance this is the right summer? Any chance you’ll come and stay, maybe a year or two? Here, the garden has gone mad – everything out – the china broken among these tools that we have made up to make up – shears, trowels, a silver-plated emerald-encrusted shovel, all swallowed up by your absence. I love our blue hearts. I think often what it is to wake up in this waterflesh and then gather rosemary. What it is to live in this wide house all alone and smother the ghost that tells me to do, to do, to do, like a train. The orchids have grown teeth in their mouths. As an aside, I have come to believe my hips might be sapphire. Any chance? Evening, shortly. Outside, the woodlice hold an amorous feast. And in the evening, I am very over –
— Miruna Fulgeanu (2020)
“The most remarkable preliminary symptoms were the variations of my need of sleep. After initial spells of insomnia, nightmare and falling asleep by day, I found that my capacity for sleep was becoming more and more remarkable: till the hours I spent in or on my bed vastly outnumbered the hours I spent awake; and my sleep was so profound that I might have been under the influence of some hypnotic drug. For two days, meals and the offices in the church — Mass, Vespers and Compline — were almost my only lucid moments. Then began an extraordinary transformation: this extreme lassitude dwindled to nothing; night shrank to five hours of light, dreamless and perfect sleep, followed by awakenings full of energy and limpid freshness. The explanation is simple enough: the desire for talk, movements and nervous expression that I had transported from Paris found, in this silent place, no response or foil, evoked no single echo; after miserably gesticulating for a while in a vacuum, it languished and finally died for lack of any stimulus or nourishment. Then the tremendous accumulation of tiredness, which must be the common property of all our contemporaries, broke loose and swamped everything. No demands, once I had emerged from that flood of sleep, were made upon my nervous energy: there were no automatic drains, such as conversation at meals, small talk, catching trains, or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life. Even the major causes of guilt and anxiety had slid away into some distant limbo and not only failed to emerge in the small hours as tormentors but appeared to have lost their dragonish validity.”
— Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence
Travelling Together
If we are separated I will try to wait for you on your side of things
your side of the wall and the water and of the light moving at its own speed even on leaves that we have seen I will wait on one side
while a side is there
— W.S. Merwin (1988)
Newborough
Hesitate to Call
Lived to see you throwing Me aside. That fought Like netted fish inside me. Saw you throbbing In my syrups. Saw you sleep. And lived to see That all. That all flushed down The refuse. Done? It lives in me. You live in me. Malignant. Love, you ever want me, don’t.
— Louise Glück (1968)
Ferns grow over the concrete blocks that are arranged to slow the erosion of the creek. Trees hang over the water. A fallen branch that almost stretches the width of the creek lies submerged but visible. Wilson watches me as I swim. Wary. Eyeing my movement with concern. I must appear like a zombie in a horror film, contorted and moving eerily unnatural and horizontal in the shallow water. Despite the hum of the irrigation pump and the faint smell of rotting leaves from the disturbed water, this is all pleasant. A reprieve from the house that still retains two days of heat.
