—so she murmured to herself during those frightening winter months, frightening in a different way from these-here autumn months: the middle of January, February, March—no news and no way of finding anything out between Cambridge—and a small Ukrainian provincial town, a studio heated by firewood in the attic of an abandoned house without an address or telephone, without a toilet or hot water, with only a bare lightbulb strung with a cord from the ceiling, with a stick of sausage and a jar of instant coffee on a low table greased with paint, would you like a sandwich? oh, and I’ve got a tomato here, too, would you like some? My God, the man lives like a stray dog, stays up until six in the morning checking out the window on that fancy automobile of his (sans garage) from behind the easel, at twenty-five or thirty you can still handle that kind of life, driven by sheer animal energy—but at forty! Meanwhile back at the Cambridge apartment, crisscrossed God knows how many times from one end to the other by senseless pacing—from the main door through the bedroom to the kitchen (the work that she purportedly came to the States to do collapsed like a crudely assembled house of cards)—something incomprehensible was happening with the phone: time after time she was awakened at dawn by random calls, she’d jump up and rush for the receiver: “Hello!”—somewhere in the distance on the voiceless line a wind howled and an ocean roared, for a few seconds the uninhabited, unpopulated space over the northern hemisphere announced itself as if in fact “someone was crying out her name at night as though from a torture chamber,” and the cries did him no good, after which the mute signal would cease: the eyes of the buttons on the receiver lit up with a green, underwater glitter and from its mouth bubbled up a soulless dial tone—ah, you both had enough will to screw up all the phone lines over the Atlantic, that fierce, hungry force stormed out from his paintings and from your poems, you recognized his at once as soon as you ended up in his studio, put on your thick glasses, and stood before his canvases, and likewise he must have recognized yours—yours, which during those winter months was so unexpectedly and totally knocked off its newly discovered axis (because you were a woman, and a woman, damn it, is a climbing plant that without a vertical support, even if it is imagined—without a love with a concrete living face to it—falls to the ground and wilts, losing all inspiration for upward momentum: every poem was a delightful bastard baby of one prince or another with a bright star on his forehead, the star, of course, inevitably went out, the poem remained)—abandoned on its own, that force tore you to bits from within, fiercely scratching at the walls of your being and bursting out in desperate freefall—
You’re a woman. And that’s your limit.
Your moon sleeps like a silver fish lure.
Like spices off the edge of a knife
Dependency sprinkled into your blood