.

Large round tables, white tableclothes and candlelight.
Floor-to-ceiling windows that frame a lakeside view;
most are seated when I arrive. The waitress wears
her hair in braids, neatly knotted on the top of
her head in two tight crimson balls; a splash of
colour that redeems her black apron and pale skin.
"Red or white?", she asks.

My slow-motion gaze lassoes the room and rests on him.
Small in stature but at ease with the odd assortment
of black-clad strangers who surround him. He floods
their awkward silence with laughter. Someone clinks
a glass to convene the crowd while he nestles against
an empty table. Jetlagged and half-standing. Declaring
to all that there is no such thing as objectivity. Full
of sentiment and high sentence, he begins. Painting
those-to-whom-he-has-made-a-difference in tonal gradations.
Their many tangled textures and reverberations. He renders
all of them in an ideosyncratic poetry-speak. The limitless
character of particular personalities comprise his
performative palette. Nothing too obtuse. Descriptions
of old letters and photographs collaged onto a plank of
portraits tossed into a wave of words. Insisting that his
writing is never personal. His is a chinese box. Wasting
nothing of himself on strangers (or so he claims). With
every scattered word, some inner core compresses tighter.

Diamond diseminations.

He praises Pushkin's Eugenia, sufficiently inspired by it
to abandon a doctoral disertation in mid-sentence, to write
his own novel. Pushkin's sonnet-style in iambic pentameter
costs him a PhD in economics. And from there, his life
spirals outward. Heart-bound by some deviant grail-quest.
He punctuates the randomness of this discovery with a wry
smirk and an itinerant gaze. Pushkin's splendid variety of
tone and desire, his novel-verse, becomes the thing that
re-routes his raison d'etre. Perhaps these speaking
engagements are his way of deconstructing himself after
each subsequent publication. To memorialize something
lost from an earlier version of himself before too much
floats away. A boat drifting farther from shore, diminishing
that intangible barrier between what he writes and who he is
(as if the two could ever be cleanly severed).

His line of flight leads toward an elusive beauty that
hides within like a ray of light that leaps off a mirror
in the opposite direction. The kind of beam that makes
any poet squint in disbelief to learn that memories are
not just encoded in the mind but snythesized throughout.
Captured in muscle tissue and bone marrow. A beauty that
denotes the kind of writer who writes to feel equal to
what he observes and experiences. Existance made endurable
only as an aesthetic fact and not for the chatter of gossip
and praise. Is this a form of self-forgetting?

This moment is singular. With the lake to my right
and with each new semantic wave baptizing my disarming
incarnation coupled with his willingness to expose
himself all over again amidst a pretense of objectivity,
it is a moment undone by a writer intent on re-viewing
the surprise that lies within. How the face of his
shifting text renews with each subsequent reading and
all the trust that this implies. His is the infinite task
of shedding old skin. For him, no repetition will ever
exhaust the novelty of what comes next. This purgatorial
quest for beauty is found in heroes and writers who
perpetually pare themselves down to the underlying
matrix of their feminine souls. As if to find that
resting place where the inward shoreandsky merge
into an intangible horizon.

Meanwhile overhead, I hear the patter of faint rain
on a skylight. He concludes the evening with one last
inquiry. Why ask for this? To be bound by pen and word?
Applause fills up the unanswered space of scraping
chairs and refilled drinks. Life quickens the strings.
The stuffy lined-up buzz of first-edition signatures
occassioning the bookseller's chardonnay-ed smile.
The evening is a success and in gratitude, he implores
"just take a copy."

While pushing past an over-heated crowd to reach
the foggy evening air, I replay every note and chord
with crisp clarity. The way it echoes every other.
His art of fugue. Phrase upon phrase. The unending
incompleteness of it. The intervals. Like a lingering
note, the answer to his question is just another question.
Why hope for happiness when this is such a sufficient gift?

"there is no one so lost
that the eternal love cannot return -
as long as hope keeps the least bit of green."
(Dante)