Sublime

‘Clair de Lune’ by Debussy.

Haruko left a tiny laughing brass Buddha up high, in a corner of the attic, where he is still laughing to this day.

lugubrious

It may well be the sentence that for diverse reasons—because thinking about Woolf, or sickness, or essays, because trying to emulate a certain rhythm in my own writing—I’ve copied out by hand more than any other.

I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.