When I was in high school I had to write an essay duplicating the manner and subject of Bacon’s “On Reading,” and I remember including all the comfortable clichés. I said nothing about how books made me masturbate. I said nothing about nightmares, about daydreaming, about aching, cock-stiffening loneliness. I said something about wonder and curiosity, the improvement of character, quickening of sensibility, enlargement of mind, but nothing about the disappearance of the self in a terrible quake of earth. I did not say that reading drove a knife into the body. I did not say that as the man at breakfast calmly spoons his oatmeal into his mouth while words pass woundlessly through his eyes, he divides more noisily than chewing, becomes a gulf, a Red Sea none shall pass over, dry-shod cross. There is no miracle more menacing than that one. I did not write about the slow return from a story like the ebb of a fever, the unique quality it conferred which set you apart from others as though touched by the gods. I did not write about the despair of not willing to be oneself or the contrary despair of total entelechy. I did not write about reading as a refuge, a toy drug, a pitiless judgment. Ah, Walther von der Vogelweide, Wolfram von Eschenbach. You could read in the roses just where my head lay. Nor did I say anything about plating magical words in my mouth such as Hausen or Morungen wrote to make a medieval miracle of my mind; because I became the consciousness that composed the poem or the paragraph: I grew great and ornate like Browne or severe as Swift or as rich and thick as Shakespeare, snappy as Pope. There is Büchner, Raspe, Richard Dehmel. There is Stefan George and Stephen Spender. Ah, Guido Cavalcanti. A cave. A cunt. Camus. The gentle muse of Hartmann von Aue or that of the Nightingale of Hagenau—Reinmar—

Nieman seneder suoche an mich deheinen rât:

ich mac mîn selbes leit erwenden niht.

is also the muse of the madman; Smart, Clare, Cowper, Blake . . . thought, word, deed . . . Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Hitler. The most beautiful name of all Oh? So? Gotcha now. Which name? Whose? What’s that you say? Lorca and Calderón? How convenient. How classy. José Garcia Villa. Just the other day these lines of exiled ink raced like motes from Hopkins’ kind of Catholic eye across my specs:

To-fro,angel! Hiving,verb!

First-lover-and-last-lover,grammatiq: Where,rise,the,equitable,stars,the,roses,of,the

zodiac,

And,rear,the,eucalypt,towns,of,love:

—Anchored,Entire,Angel:

Through,whose,huge,discalced,arable,love, Bloodblazes,oh,Christ’s,gentle,egg: His, terrific,

sperm.

Behind a wall of words I watch the girls. Pavese. The streets are dry and a light is burning at the back of the pharmacy.

One of the shames of my childhood, one of the signs of my unstable sexuality, one of the sources of discontent and provocation, was my weak whistle. It carried, like a whisper, mostly wind, and could flutter a candle on a cake, but never beckon a dog, achieve attention, turn a head in a crowd, signify excitement. I foozed and muffled and whoo’d and wet the air without achieving a single acceptable male-made expression of amazement, nor could I do the forked-finger bit, causing my breath to scream like some banshee as it squeezed between my teeth. Even at my present age I can barely carry a nursery tune through pursed lips. So what am I thinking of now, as I try to whistle up a favoring wind? Who, among the gods, will hear a hooosh?