When I was a child and played the fiddle, a couple times a year the teachers would dress us all up smart, range us in a hemicircle on the dusty boards of the local Culture Palace and set us to screeching & scratching. Probably the most beautiful music I've ever heard has been produced by such arrangements of forces, and has been striven after in vain by more sophisticated & self-conscious collaborations. Back in Soviet days we used to get occasional visits from some of the lights of Lenigrad & Moscow free-jazz. One underground concert of that stamp was all any reasonable person needed before they were converted forever toward the purer pleasures of the official stage: the child violin-gang.

A street find, this resistant picture. Written on the back: Tiraspol Tinereţe Joc, 1979. Tiraspol Youth Players, 1979. My grandfather's grandchild displaced in time and place?

I went there again today, without you. Your sister used to work upstairs, for Greeks. Greeks upstairs and down. Downstairs was where I went, the breakfast place. One year ago we were there, radiating our complexity. Today, my attempts to radiate anything were strained, and the yogurt was not. This last a minor disaster: I'd gone in, sentimental motives aside, for the yogurt, which I remembered having impressed me with its generosity, its texture, its honey & walnuts; a trace of romaiosyne in the otherwise predictable breakfast menu. Traces, traces only.

Out the window snow dirtily splotches fields running down from the city's edge to the Dniester's banks. We were going to hide for the rest of our lives over there, in the dead places; hide in abjection, ill-health, poverty. Make a home of those things. Why? Rina wanted to, she had a thing about the Trans-Dniester. My cousin talked us out of it: she wanted us to go to Vienna and drink coffee with buttery complements. I told her I embrace Islam, but not its twee shadow-bodies – and anyway prefer tea, like any Turk. She told me I'm not one, I said well neither are you. Then we kissed, as cousins do; and no hard feelings. But no Trans-Dniester, either, for Rina.

I hate the capitalist system.
Shorthand for a thousand things: the internet, violence, phallogocentrism.
A more intricate shorthand, though, in the active totality of the utterance, hides its vulnerable heart: I love the world.

I have been remembering our first days together at Purpooduck.
It was soon after the defense of her dissertation: "Urban Planning as Manifestation of Desire". Rina cooked me placinta, with mustarded sardines on saltines, and bananas republic for dessert. I said, "Rina, I like you!" She said, "You are such a sadist." After some time, sweating, and with heart pounding, I said, "Well, do you like me?" She said, "Don't now be a masochist." Discussion then was stilled till our next get-together.
I learned that every healthy relation begins with a little sado-masochism.
The lack of loving Rina is clotting a spot into the nervous tissues of my body the size of my body, that is to say: all over. The spot, the lack, will not be sated by sadism – or by anything else – this winter.

Every now and then I find myself drifting down streets I know too well, my throat scratchy at the back, my shoulders high and tight; I find myself finding things I already knew were there, where they were, where I expected them to be – where, nevertheless, I'm surprised to find them. Every now and then my entire situation decomposes. In those thens, these nows, the course I can take is clear and single: ignition. Flame be my weather, let heat's happy crackle expand the narrow way! Such is my mantric gesture, my prayer. I mumble, maunder, malinger. Nothing follows.

MY GLANCE CAN CARRY THOUGHT, AND DOES: ACROSS SHORT SPACE OF WATER TO BLACK PURPOODUCK, WHERE YOU ARE. AGAINST THAT GLANCE COMES SUN, CRUSHING; ALL IS COLOR, OR FLAME WITHOUT COLOR, OR WICK-BLACK, DEPENDING ON ITS RELATION TO THIS LATE LOW SUN. I LAY MY HEAD BACK, GLAD TO FIND THAT THE RISING PLANE OF THE ROCKER RECEIVES IT. EYES CLOSED, ANOTHER RELIEF, THE LIGHT FLOODING THEM DIFFERENTLY NOW. I CHOOSE WARM OVER BRIGHT. HEART DRIFTS, MIND SLEEPS. BODY SLEEPS: PENCIL DROPS FROM LIPS TO CHEST, WAKING ME. BIRD-DROPPING, FALLEN BOTTLE-STOPPER, STAR. MY GLANCE OPENS, TAKES ALL, WRITES YOU BEHIND ALL, CLOSES.

My grandfather, crouching at center; his sister, second from right.

Rina invited me to visit her father's mine again. On our last visit I found the mine surface ugly and was critical of the environmental effects. This time we began to experiment with the acoustics of the area. The strange effects we found may have had to do with the positive energetic qualities of selenite which is a very special crystal. There was no normal echo. In this "echo" our yells traveled back and forth, outwardly diffusing into an audio halo, mellowing into a pure tone. Although the surface gypsum did not seem especially friable, small pieces fell off the walls, every time ringing the sound in a crumbling veil. We called this effect the "echoplex" which we may rename because it fails to take into account the warm and loving feelings engendered in us. I don't know if these kinds of things are common occurrences at gypsum mines.
On the last visit I also found a wrapper of the american snack "Twinkie", which gave us a good laugh.
Rina, forgive my habit, gypsum flower.

This morning the sunshine is not as full as it has been, mornings; color doesn't come of it as easily or as richly. I look out at rather a meager world.
There's a delegation of historians from Jassy here today: they make their requests, I serve them their papers, books, microfiches. I'm turned off by the nationalist cut of their suits and of their lines of inquiry. Nothing I say pleases them, besides.
My cousin X is of the opinion I should get out of Moldova, like she did.

Donuts are for children and for yanquis. When a parent feeds a child a donut, s/he grounds the youngster in the ethnic chaos of yanquidom. I knew a yanqui once, he lived here for a year or two. He used to write with spray-paint on the walls of the state office-buildings; for example he did it here at the National Library one time. Finally he was sent away. He used to write, "CIA + FBI = TWA + PANAM," things like that. Things that meant nothing.

It's nice to notice now the days lengthening here, the solstice a couple weeks gone; funny though how the longer days go by more quickly.

Today I uncapped a tubelet of lip moisturizer, "plain flavor," and realized it had the same smell as dumplings with garlic sauce. It was then that I realized I was walking past a couple eating pork sausage out of a tin and that I was actually smelling the pork sausage at that moment instead of the lip moisturizer, but then I smelled the lip moisturizer and confirmed that all three smell the same.
I had a brief communication with Rina this evening. I trust in our friendship but I don't always trust myself. I must guard our friendship from my pride, a task that makes my head ache.

Our systems have been shaken by some kind of doubling of names reminding me of a certain village dance among the hill-people here: the weaving in of the first man, the two women following and the next man diving through the arch of their arms to lock elbows with the first, etc. As a child I never could follow the sense of it, only the feeling. Such is my position now, about this: unprecedentedly strange as it is, someone seems clearly to have been in the office last night after the last clerk left & I locked up. When I came this morning and unlocked the door, it would not open: this because it had not in fact been locked and so my unlocking had locked it. On entering, finally, puzzled, the first things I noticed were an odor of attar, a tension in my chest, and a large photograph on my desk. After these, nothing, against an hour's meticulous investigation. The photograph is beautiful. On its reverse is written a woman's name, nine characters, the first and last of which are S; I happen to know positively, however, that the holder of that name who invests it with a particular significance for me is at present bodily & heartily resident in a snowbound town some thousands of kilometers away from here. I can't begin to figure out who the gentle enterer was, or where they got their key.