From: Practicalities, by M. Duras, "The Cutter-off of Water", Grove Press, NY

In life [it] happens all the time, when someone goes away, or dies, or when there's a suicide no one ever anticipated. People forget what was said, what went before and should have warned them.

All four of them went and lay down on the rails of the high-speed train near the station. The man and the woman each held a child in their arms, and waited for the train. The Cutter-off of Water didn't have an enemy in the world.

I add to the story of the Cutter-off of Water the fact that the woman, who everyone said was retarded, knew something for certain anyhow,: she knew she couldn't count, now any more than ever, on anyone's helping her and her family out. She knew she was abandoned by everyone, by the whole of society, and that the only thing left for her to do was die. She knew that. It's a terrible, fundamental, awful knowledge. So the question of her backwardness ought to be reconsidered, if anyone ever talked about her again. Which they won't.

This is probably the last time she'll ever be remembered. I was going to mention her name, but I don't know what it was. The case has been closed.

What stays in the mind is a child's unslaked thirst in a sweltering summer a few hours before it died, and a young retarded mother wandering about until it was time.

The Kama Sutra of Kindness: Position No. 2

should I greet you
as if
we had merely eaten
together one night
when the white birches
dripped wet
and lightning etched
black trees on your walls?

it is not love
I am asking

love comes from years
of breathing
skin to skin
tangled in each other's dreams
until each night
weaves another thread
in the same web
of blood and sleep

and I have only
passed through you quickly
like light

and you have only
surrounded me suddenly
like flame

the lake is cold
the snows are sudden
the wild cherry bends
and winter's a burden

in your hand I feel
spring burn in the bud.

Mouth on fire...stream of words...in her ear...practically in her ear...not catching the half...not the quarter...no idea what she's saying!...imagine! no idea what she's saying!...and can't stop...

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...

For Elizabeth

It is winter ending on earth. The planets align tomorrow in March and grow more distant from the sun and each other like stray, worn soldiers retreating from an enemy that no longer exists. It is a mild spring in purgatory. In green limbo the children whose foreheads are dry, whose hands do not grow, are transformed themselves to seasons of birds circling an obelisk of shivering mercury. None are allowed prey, none are allowed heaven's crooked beak. They are radiant swallows with thorns for tongues to feed on the shifting mercury from the mythology of God's hand, which I cannot break, even now, under this tearful scrutiny. I've tried. I've tried. I am allowing to pass through me a statement of death. You, the catalyst of such distorted memory. In that limbo the children move in some strange gravity within and outside Grace. Their Lord is angry. They have died with their innocence untested. None knows what it has been or will be ~ each day it changes without changing ~ do you understand what I am saying? It is the life you chose on this Earth, the life of junk and lies. But that wasn't You, I knew You ~ you had perfect lips, eyes like a true child, your breasts unformed, an incandescent mind. This place where I put you now, it is a cursed season, an awkward line, a flawed circle, a snake on fire devouring what tomorrow it will itself become.

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.