What is a woman like when she awakes? Embedded in herself, twin-hilled: a more intimate body, breathing life, renewing itself from life, physically more uniform: skin-SELF, flesh-SELF, hair-SELF, and yet an inner cavern: SELF de profundis, well and source (my foster mother in the flower cup: as if floating on the watery surface: images of flooding)—

WELLSPRING SELF (I’d like to know what kind of a face I make during an orgasm. I once tried to catch it in a mirror: it didn’t work, of course. What I saw was an embarrassingly indiscreet face—embarrassingly convicted of its embarrassment. Yet strangely bloated in shock: like when you step on a garden hose. Like Schwab when he was made to see or hear something embarrassing) . . .

Schwab and the scene with Gaia in the car: we in front (very uncomfortable), he supposedly drunk and unconscious in the back . . . I must have acted quite predatory: guttural sounds squeezed out through grinding teeth and the like—

was that why Schwab thanked me? . . . (Gaia by the way came entirely without jungle shrieks, completely interiorized, an inner shudder. Christa sobbed blissfully, albeit only during our engagement. Dawn? I don’t remember; I remember almost nothing about Dawn; only her breasts, the way I finally peeled them out of the onion sheathes of her bedtime armature that first time . . . Few women emit that beautiful cry, like Stella and sometimes Gisela . . .)

At last (for a long time now) I am sovereignly I MYSELF: undisturbed by remorse that I am as I am. I carry imprinted within myself the image of the girl I slept with last night. Sharply inscribed upon my mind’s eye. How does it go in the Arabian Nights? “As if someone had sewn it into my eyelids . . .”

the linear curves of a young female body and their punctuation: from the angle of the raised arm propping up the head (the hand drowned in the whirling torrent of hair), drawn in an arc into the seashell of the underarm and then lifted to the apple roundings of the breasts, from whose buds a rhythmic slope runs down to the flat declivities and curvatures of the flanks and belly, where the line, to which the now entirely symbolic flesh is confined, swings out again from the violin-like constriction to the voluptuousness of the hip, from which a thigh rises, exposing its inner surface in a steep, indolent warping.

She sleeps, very happy and relaxed. So I’m still together as a man (Kisa Gotami at the sight of Buddha: Blessed indeed is the mother, blessed indeed is the father, blessed indeed is the wife whose is a lord so glorious). I am even still young enough to imagine beating someone up—the handsome Pole with his awful arms, for instance. (Schwab always wanted to do that.) He was presumably a lot stronger than I—at least heavier. Cousin Wolfgang also carried a powerful thorax on his somewhat short legs and womanly Germanic hips (from Uncle Helmuth).