In a Garden
No. 25
Trouble is, I like lyrical raillery, its peremptory dash and sweet ‘murth’rous’ tomfoolery concocting up a self inconstant and ungovernable in its ruses. Like the lean sentimentalism of the original contingent out of Europe unleashing its fury against the ‘virginal’ wilderness: an economy of accost and disperse. A scuff-batter’d registry mark’d ‘To Ol’ Pea-Blossom, that we hym shal knogh.’ A tiger swallowtail, summer’s pale incipit, flaps aimlessly up into the reaches of the cherry tree. Locust seedlings push up through the snow-hammer’d duff: the capricious expugnable poise of the natural world, its discrepant propensity to vary its holdings. A tender green vireo, cause of expiry unbeknownst, is cover’d with red-eyed Sarcophagidae. Thorns pierce my brow.
—Talk balk.
—
Two lines out of Enrique Vila-Matas’s Montano’s Malady: “And then I remembered how I used to see myself remembering seeing myself writing and finally I remembered seeing myself remembering how I used to write.” And: “Edmond Jabès said that, whenever one writes, one runs the risk of never writing again.”
Elisabeth Reuter, “Jabès’s Yukel”
(After Edmond Jabès’s Le Livre des Questions)
(After Edmond Jabès’s Le Livre des Questions)