When I took those monies and that natty outfit & went up to the city solid gone, who'd've thought I'd've been back here now so soon, spilling salty fluids on the parquet and swishing in your silks, finding out in condensed time more about this poor cluttered heart than I'd ever expected to learn in the whole librarybound rest of my lifetime. Enough with these silks, enough with these sobb-spattered spats & gleaming pumps. My life is done and I step out of its crinoline husk in utter gladness: out of my life, into the world! Your long, soft, liney hand in mine; my big-veined, broadish, bony hand in yours. Our hearts enmeshed, an endless text.

The doctor tells me my eyes need work; he speaks, however, against spectacles, advocating instead a more critical participation in world-fibre, specifying particular activities which he says will redound toward a loosening of the warpy little orbs in their pits. Of such he named tennis and butterfly-chasing: loose, quick eyes, never drop the swift bright ball or the powdery winglets!

Taurian nature of our ragged, almost make-believe Bessarabian nation-state's heraldry resonates weakly with my own cuspish star-stuff as birth-month's silver moon and silver rose approach and year's first butterflies emerge. Bull and butterfly: the problematic of me.

Marie, Marie: unmarried, forty, long about the face and thighs... Without the ellipsis, by which I cede punctuational control, without the animating power of a bankrupt tradition of genderbound erotic apostrophe, how could I speak of her? We met at twenty, in sunlight, introduced by her boyfriend's brother: under a broad straw hat our eyes set immediately to vexing themselves brimful with flirtation. My heart was born that day, I later found. A little seed, it quickly grew, through passions, to more or less the size of the grain of rye in Tolstoi's story. A simple growth: that's to say, it grew drily, retaining all its quiet seed-nature, not changing except in dimensions. A fist-sized seed, then, as inert, as simple as a stone, but with secret intelligence charging it with difference. The swelling, splitting, rootlet-fingering – the pain and joy of germination – came later.

One by one my coworkers have degenerated into uncompanionable shades. The air in our office has always been so broad and generous – the wooden furnishings, the big windows, the tenth-storey view through birdflight across shadow-dappled ground to transdniestria: but lately it feels close, clotted, the clerks all mooning around gogolianly, my old friends, Alyosha, Cătălin, Mioritza! I try childhood games, folkdances, guest-appearances by my brother & his tisanes. Nothing yet succeeds in brightening the scene.