I wonder - do you remember reading Beckett’s Molloy together, Nat, on our first true camping trip into the Sierra Nevadas. The daze of ice melt lake waters that we felt could only have willed themselves that cold.
How at one point, scolding, the title character offers this inimitable depiction of his interaction with a man he meets while passing through the forest,
     “He asked for bread and I offered him fish. That is me all over.”
A humorous and distinctly noncaustic denial of the encountered stranger’s wishes at which you and I laughed and laughed. Breathing the fir and birch into our kerchiefs, squatting before our poor and smoky fire.


But what about this equation:
“He asked to be allowed to starve himself, he was starving himself, and I shoved a wide gauge phalange of inflexible rubber through his nasal passage - threading via tearing - an inflamed and swollen route shooting all the way to his intestinal cavity. Against gravity, four times a day, for weeks upwards, I grumpily pumped an unwanted survivalist porridge directly into his digestive organs, bypassing in kind the visible resistance of his mouth and mind to any such actions.
                                    That is me all over.”

That is us all over.
We are all over.
We over all.

Damn it all, Nat. I wake up literally in mid- vomit lately, wracked in the weather and battering of a tattered conscious. It couldn’t be called ‘rest’. Rather, so prone, the world slowly enters my dreams in jagged metal spindles and drifted cinders that there’s nothing for us to do but room in. I fin awake – quaking and gagging, curled up in claustrophobic shivers of disgust - combustible - riddled by incursions of short cuts and interior rusting.


I trust we must ask how to come nearer,
how to approach, even if fearfully, these humming, high-tension bodies so alive in their losses.
         For which no gloss is possible really.                         Or adequate.




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