[a baroque portrait]

She is pointed, but does not pierce.  All that she was at 21, eyes dripping blue, walking foreign streets.  She finds she cannot fake.  Wed to wakefulness.  Her febrile fingers flaunt flowing script.  "Float script e's so pretty."  In trains.  On trains.  Near trains.  Waiting for loneliness to exuent.  (This was before before Desolation Road).  Three obliterated moons; the climax a blurry barrage and then, finally, blessed pacification.  But before that, lugubrious expressing.  Which is to say, windows full of raintears.  love & jackhammers, she later signed the letter.  But that was after.  Before she started the affair, she lamented her loss of whom.  Herself.  In leaving America, she left herself.  And in the space of her loss were expanses of foreign streets.  "The drama of our time is the coming of all men into one fate," wrote Robert Duncan.  She wasn't reading him then, she was reading Nietzsche: Keiner ist so verrückt, daß er nicht einen noch Verrückteren findet, der ihn versteht--No one is so crazy that he couldn't find someone crazier who understands him.  She was reading Foucault's Dies ist keine Pfeife (This is not a pipe...).  She was reading Häutungen by Verena Stefan.  Here is a portrait of her against a snowy scene in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.  Here she is in Amsterdam with a dovetailed joint examining the deliciousthick brushstrokes of van Gogh.  And here, here she is in Prague, in a room with three boys ogling the hem of her dress...sexuality producing a desired tension (as in a loom).  Go in any direction and out.  So she followed her idol into the u-bahn.  Her idol:  an amazonian Evangelista.  Her idol:  an equivalent flourish, an ampersand.  She was in awe of her venerable idol.  She went into hiding.  They both did.  Two shes painted on separate beds because one wouldn't bow to the other.  But this is a portrait of the one she, the one who sang along: hunger hurts but starving works when it costs too much to love.  Gravitas and A Thousand Splendid Suns was in her future.  War and the waiting for war to end.