In a few months I shall enter my third sabbatical, the first I’ve spent outside Germany, and Martha thinks we should ship somewhere civil like Greece, but I say what is civil about Greece, what is civil about the sea, what is civil? Perhaps she will go off to dig up ancestors, fetch up a few quarterings like old bones from a bog. Peace to me, I say. I deserve a little of the snore of God. I deserve the pillow and the slow fern fan. After twenty-one years of talk, of tests, of “please be clear and don’t repeat”; after twenty-one years of blue pencils, sly and friendly faces, cute excuses, scratchy chalk; after Susu, Lou and Rue, and every sweater-swollen coed who set her thighs to singing so a smile would grace her grade; oh, I need my letup, I need my release; after such a restless life awake to hear the morning paper reach the lawn as though I were guarding the grass; awake so the first alert birds may howdeedo a hallelujah before they breakfast on worms and fruit—I need my comatostie drowse, ray swaddle, Seventh Heaven, Sunday, my barbiturates, my sleep.

Dawn slips under the low black clouds like a body under bedclothes. I let the storm slam when I leave the house. All clear, Martha, all clear. The garden goes by me quietly, a cemetery now, and the orchard parts like the Red Sea. Our garage is dark and empty. Lou loved me. I read Rilke. Swam. Strolled the lead cliffs. Apples like warn hearts litter the ground and the crisp air makes my skin pimple. That’s it: the kids are gone. The cold has crystallized the rain so its puddles break beneath my heavy boots, and my stride eats up space like a jaw. I remember my youth, when I was pleased with my body. Today—it’s odd—-the thought does not disturb me. I can feel my bones move, and my spirits are lifting with the light. I am happy to be alone in this good world, and I leap the muddy drainage ditch with ease—not always so—-and proceed into the open woods as if I lived there and had nothing to walk quickly for, nothing to fear.

Actually . . . Actually I speak. I doze. I stammer. I correct. I shout. I bow. And I applaud. In the cave of the winds. The right side writes, the left listens. To the sound of the scribble. A fraction thinks, a fraction weeps, a fraction spits . . . not right. A fraction jibes, a fraction measures, a fraction rhymes, a part romances, a part connives, one part’s as sweetly reasonable as pie. A sliver loves, another cheats, a quarter flies; one shits with a twenty-eighth . . . not tight, not right at all. I piss with my penis. I chew with my teeth, only my eyes see, it’s my nose which breathes, and my hair is an outdated hat. Is that the way I am divided . . . into faculties? No one should be a university. Not that stiff-eyed multitude, that fractured plurality of egos: IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII . . . they are a decorative fence, a Jewish exclamation, a nest of hurdles, warning siren, engine puffing, iron track, clever mechanical birdie, zipper’s straddle . . . husband scholar good sport papa lover . . . I don’t know. I’m over fifty . . . over . . . In a certain sense, unsentimentally, my life is over. You age. One does. One thinks, one weeps . . . God. I don’t know. I take close notes. You age, you lose your faculties, become a faculty. If you are lucky you become a mind, abstract as history.