《IN THAT GREAT RIVER A NOTEBOOK》.pdf

In That Great River: A Notebook The sunrise observed in a puddle — a great metaphor. * * * St. Theresa of the Child Jesus: “I choose all.” * * * Why do I need these landscapes? The image of the sea draws me out of myself, forces all my attention to the surface so that I can cast my thought into the depths once again. As if an imaginative blow were needed for a longer, better-aimed thrust into the depths. Contemplation. The roots of my astonishment at the world cling tight to my inner life, in a tangle of memories, experiences, atavisms from both my own childhood and that of our species. * * * For fish death takes the shape of the beautiful white gull with wide- spread wings whose flight we trace with rapture. * * * I remembered the bombardment and the great light that preceded it. At first it fell from above, that beautiful, blinding, greenish light, so bright that it seemed to illuminate the earth’s every wrinkle. That light illuminates every person, every cell, vein, artery like an x-ray; everything is ready for death. It irradiates and exposes all that is hid- den most deeply —terror, the body’s animal terror. The light unmasks, cruelly, before killing. And that is why after the air raid a person rises ashamed: he hasn’t died, he’s still alive. It’s stripped him bare, to the death; that light has ripped the last confes- sion from his body, but he hasn’t measured up, he couldn’t die. He lives on, duplicitous and frightened. ANNA k AMIENS kA 231 * * * I don’t write poetry when I wish, I write when I can’t, when my lar- ynx is flooded and