“Hamburg, can you hear me? The party in Paris is not answering!”

The close voice, lunging:

“The party in Paris is not picking up.”

I said, “Please keep trying. Someone has to answer. It’s a hotel.”

The last sentence stood like a mountain: planted there by faith.

I listened to my own voice passing through the cosmos. (My breath had thrust its way between me and the echoing expanses. It perched on my chest like a beloved cat: a purring of the secret of myself.)

•

I was no longer a magician. I no longer conjured up lower, subservient spirits in order to awaken a slumbering corpse and have her follow me, sleepwalking from the underworld into life. Something more powerful had emerged from me, walking through the night with my voice, like the word of an archangel:

It announced to the anguished waker the tiding of patience.

Beneath it, the earth had gone wintry and rigid: a poor people’s land in the broken poetry of a collage: snowy expanses of paper, forests scattered like shreds of felt; the rusty wire ribbing of the plowland in the stringwork of roads, glass shards, glittering like ponds—and settlements like Bethlehem: humble earth-stars, sheltered from burning out by God’s hollow hand.

My voice passed over them, across a thousand leagues, to arouse again the sparse rippling of the strand of pearls, the monosyllabic flute tones:

Tracer trajectory fading in its goal—

the tiding of PATIENCE cleaved to the telephone switchboard in the Hôtel Épicure.

Here, it was transformed into a desperately malicious buzzing, and it feebly sawed away at the trunk of the stillness

—which had grown into the stairway chasms with crooked roots and sprouted its branches into the corridors and rustled its dark foliage in the rooms over the gaping mouths of the sleepers—

sawed away and dulled its teeth with each of its powerless strokes.

•

This went on night after night from twelve to four. If I then fell asleep, I dreamed and committed my murder.

•

The jittery disquiet of love. That beatific state of being beside oneself. High frequency of existence in full, immediate presentness. A sporadic condition, announced by a preliminary stage of amorous inclination; until chance selects a specific woman, every female is a potential love object—which may explain some of my relapses with Nadine.

Meanwhile, the pure gifts of God: effortless, cheerful, uncomplicated, noncommittal bedroom affairs (similar to periods of effortless success when writing: gambler’s luck: being in harmony with the cosmos: FOR UNTO EVERY ONE THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN . . .)