OK, so let me read then just a few pages
from the beginning of A Reading, which was begun in June of 1978
in this way.
Before that and before that, everything in a line.
Where it was broken into the house.
Not a body, but still I could not
see that it didn't have a roof.
Then there was something to cry about.
Assumption of protection, whether I
thought the sky the top of whatever does,
this I carry forward.
The sky which was not a limit, but apparently so,
and that mistake which colored it.
What color?
As if in another light, so shadows.
It was required that a number of complicated actions
were to be performed in a certain sequence.
It would get you there.
She who goes back in a straight line,
the illusion of irrelevance.
So that we could trace it ticking, single-minded.
The sun now coming clear of the clouds nearest us
and sharper lines.
This goes black and white, I won't count it.
Thrawn had from out there, as if a giant hand.
The persistence of that.
Why in the dark, crippled, misshapen,
flung into the game broken, a counter.
Gnostic.
Deus absconditus.
How forever and a way, I would wonder
if this came from anywhere or floating unconnected
as clouds seem to.
Mysterious powers now visible, rest in that,
as water now solid, air more so, she flies,
impinging on another time.
Cut-ups have made fools of us all.
And excellent fooling to be so fooled.
Knife track cutting it, this fat hand,
turning in time same as his, which I see more
than his name, the stubborn inheritance
that which persists.
A will which changes.
There in the squawk and whistle of the bird motors
pulling, this to step to the next one.
How out there, an old breathlessness about the sea
rising or falling.
Falling into the stream not to make
the leap, what, to miss a step.
Some rhythm unheard.
Cat herding, eyes down, that cut off beyond which,
how she was a nerve to me.
How quickly she some other takes place goes and is lost.
Cornucopia, a readiness to provide
all that is needed, that abundance, that fertility,
choking, lighting up one side of the face only,
casting what else into shadow.
The deprivations, the glut.
Continued, this was an echo, the double claustrophobia,
an illness in which one suffocates, closing in,
there seem to be.
Overwhelmingly, always the word ready at the tip.
Our lack of conviction, the exaggeration,
the more we don't, the more we.
Now, looking back, but not wanting to trace the way
the forest closed behind her.
The trees sinister, consciously malevolent,
clasping branches behind one's back.
That reading or casting out.
The powers that oppose us, now clearly visible.
The source is not split.
It is not older than we are.
Finding it, how know it.
Everything else unchosen.
Waste.
To settle our differences, to count up
all the bills and separate piles,
exchange value, what use?
Everything else thrown away under a spell.
The end of trailing clouds of glory
or its other, the hand and darkness, flinging
as if mud, excrement.
To have done with the judgment of childhood.
That haunting, that echo, hearing him in it.
Artaud, an illness, perhaps.
So old there would be no.
A dream of whose murder.
Afterward, she lay there, a bank of gray clouds growing.
Having chosen whether there is no ocean, the way
of the boundary, the way of the flood,
her face in the dark window.
Dark how she saw it and spelled me.
A fragment of an analysis.
It was so easy to knock her out just like the movie,
she asked for it.
Bonk on the head, she was done for.
But someone righteous in Spanish saw it from an upper window.
We were caught.
How bare faced.
All those women, how they tried to be
a conscience for one another.
How lying seemed their native tongue.
Not to say William, bilious.
Not to echo, repeat what won't come clear.
Not to be caught here and sticking in the throat,
gagging, the saying not to say.
We covered it up, but were found out anyway.
It was done in the open.
That's where the wind comes.
For wind read calm and the darkness,
and for darkness we light.
That's where she is one or another.
So must be both the murdered or murderer.
Think of it, choosing chooses all,
drags in the cat's tail are tourist, far
star, clouds of glory.
This is talk.
Talk is cheap.
The interminable reading, the infinite analysis.