This morning outside the window cardinals invisibly "tutoyered" - tu tu tu.

Przyjdziesz w upalny, skwarny dzień/Pod złoty żytni bróg/I legniesz jak liliowy cień/ U moich nóg. Yes I know that I will, my question is - viendras-tu?

Later, from Corpus Christi, comes this search phrase that lands on the Fuseli nightmare image in one of my posts: "Paralysed force, gesture without motion." That doesn't sound good. I've been through that, with 1.0. Was this a message from you? I don't know the reference. I search, discover that it's from a T.S. Eliot poem, The Hollow Men, that I never heard of, much less read, which makes me wonder, whatever my pretensions or illusions, how literate I actually am. It turns out to be a very well-known poem. It begins,

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

My mood lurches southward the more I read and think about this poem, especially since I wonder if it might be a message from you. (Then again, it might not be - forever and again the incorrigible uncertainty.) I know so little about you - I wouldn't have guessed you to be an Eliot cognoscenti - but my dear Dmitri, what is that grim realization of his? About everything mattering the most to him being hidden, and mattering the least being on the surface?

"Paralysed force, gesture without motion." Are your hands as tied as that?

R.S.V.P.

Look, I'm not feeling happy at the moment for a number of reasons. It's the last day of March and however it came in or left, it seems that April will start cruelly with a snowstorm tonight. April means --- "this month." I've sustained myself for weeks now with the thought of our meeting "this month." And now that it approaches I don't know if it will happen or not.

If it doesn't I can live with that, but I do need to know - have that uncertainty dispelled. I can't dwell in deluded fantasy for the next three weeks only to arrive to find that I'm spending the week there by myself, again. (Alone Again, Naturally.) If that is to happen then please R.S.V.P. - ah eh ee oh ew - even the paralysed character in the Schnabel film Diving Butterfly, no that wasn't the title of it, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - could communicate by fluttering a single eyelid, via which he dictated an entire memoir. Did I mention that he was physically, though not existentially, paralysed?

In other words, I will be fine by myself in B'klyn, but would like some time in advance to imagine myself there in that mode, so that when I arrive I am okay with that. So - please - one way or another...

the favor of your reply (bellehudson12534 at gmail.com) is requested

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Alone Again, Naturally
by Gilbert O'Sullivan