Prose Piece

In a Garden

No. 25

Trouble is, I like lyrical raillery, its peremptory dash and sweet ‘murth’rous’ tomfoolery concocting up a self inconstant and ungovernable in its ruses. Like the lean sentimentalism of the original contingent out of Europe unleashing its fury against the ‘virginal’ wilderness: an economy of accost and disperse. A scuff-batter’d registry mark’d ‘To Ol’ Pea-Blossom, that we hym shal knogh.’ A tiger swallowtail, summer’s pale incipit, flaps aimlessly up into the reaches of the cherry tree. Locust seedlings push up through the snow-hammer’d duff: the capricious expugnable poise of the natural world, its discrepant propensity to vary its holdings. A tender green vireo, cause of expiry unbeknownst, is cover’d with red-eyed Sarcophagidae. Thorns pierce my brow.

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Talk balk.

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Two lines out of Enrique Vila-Matas’s Montano’s Malady: “And then I remembered how I used to see myself remembering seeing myself writing and finally I remembered seeing myself remembering how I used to write.” And: “Edmond Jabès said that, whenever one writes, one runs the risk of never writing again.”

Elisabeth Reuter, “Jabès’s Yukel”
(After Edmond Jabès’s Le Livre des Questions)