Structured by a startling and, from the exoteric point of view, unimaginable principle.

I know I can write my way out of this black hole back to all the things that I miss.--Blake Schwarzenbach

Notes on “The Statue and the Bust”: Browning paying a compliment to his wife “filled the fine empty” where the sheath is the body or soul and an allusion to Byron’s child—a moment of affine voraussetzung—a crime a literal crime—narrative representation of speech. Terza rima not so easy in Italian; desperate rhymes just out of arms reach; encolure: the neck and shoulder of a horse.

She was to be his guide from the airport to the hotel; he looked at her and held her in his vision a moment before she recognized his placard—it was a long moment. She was saying something in Italian, sounded like “terza rima,” her name maybe. He gave her a look like only a lover could, and he held it, and it almost stuck. Her dress was gaudy. This blood act ruins deeply, it made him think, in a poetic humor. Gladly he would stare at her all afternoon. She was charming.

What would “fill the fine empty” of that cab ride to the hotel? He with his broken Italian and only a sneeze of German: voraussetzung! He thought he saw the moon already, hiding behind some black dumpster, a blink betraying its pretense; it pretends to be awake.

He tried out his Italian on her—trying to find some consonance (her city after all rhymed with his, though it was a desperate rhyme)—but it was broken, his Italian that is.

And so they arrived at his hotel and without a word she accompanied him to his room and undressed. The hot evening spilling in from the balcony drew moisture from her thighs in arabesque conduits down her legs—they made the circuit while he muttered I love you through clenched teeth and in a language she was sure to fail to understand.

He traced a finger along her stomach to the purlieu of a dark thicket of exquisite nettles, shrouded about in the room’s heavy and darkening sadness. He enjoyed most of all the post-coital melancholy—what vulgarity he could summon in such a state. This blood act ruins deeply, gladly your gaudy dress; it leaves you charming with trash-heap grime and rot, behind a cramped apartment; the dumpster blocks out the setting moon—your makeup—your eyes.

I love you he uttered through sour lips. He crept out of the room and made his way down to the hotel bar—she pretended to not be awake.

Too jetlagged to feel his heart break, he drank, through clenched teeth. He’d live, he thought, tonight tomorrow.