You will meet a lovely woman, and maybe she writes.
You’re excited – you stay up late drinking coffee,
smoking cigarettes, wandering your sleep-empty city,
passing in the streetlamp shadows, talking of poets,
of art sustaining you through melancholy – and you,
young writer, will have a thought: I’ll give her a book.
You choose something close to your heart. Gilbert,
or Hass. Maybe even Updike. Your intent is pure:
to let her heart walk concurrently with yours. To say,
here is something intimate that only you will understand.
And she will reciprocate. She will give you Kundera or
Murakami, and on each page you’ll find bits of viscera,
scattered remnants of her soul. And this will arouse some
deep singularity, and these books become a reprieve from
the incessant loneliness of life. Until some months later,
after your walks have grown shorter, and your talks
less feverish, she shows up at your door on a rainy
spring day with coffee and a serious look on her face.
Your books, whose weight have lost their esteemed
luster, are hidden in her bag. But because she is gracious,
she will not ask for Kundera or Murakami back. She knows
you are nostalgic, and helplessly selfish. So these artifacts
of your time together gather dust. You wouldn’t think
of opening them. And you find that Gilbert is now
ruined, and Hass leaden with new sorrow. Even old
Updike has been cursed. You think this miasma will
eventually disperse. And it does disperse – from the
streets, from your bedroom, from the cafes you
frequented. But you can’t come within two feet of
Kundera or Gilbert without your breath seizing. A
substantial amount of time passes. You meet a new
woman, also lovely. You walk and talk, and because
time has blunted your memory, you slavishly open
yourself to her. And one morning, as you make for
the door – running a few minutes late, perpetually –
you have a thought: I wonder if she’s read Robinson?