Le merle noir

What are these things that are coming to mind? Meditation, I am so lonely when I think about the black tower, of which I am every second more aware. Inside the black tower sits an old woman in black dress. Or sometimes, she gets up—I see her—and she goes to the window that looks out on black birds passing tunefully, slowly by the purple clouds in front of the old, very old sun. I think the sun is her son if she could ever have one. But it is not fun for her. Not exactly! She is inside a man—in a little painful but just so happy black tower inside a man. And she need never come outside because she is already her whole life outside (by imaginative leaps sometimes abreast, sometimes against the young man’s wanderings) with the sun in her eyes and slicking her black feathery hair. She doesn’t need to die but when the young man dies, when he is old like how she is now. I have seen her late at night when I try to sleep and my eyelids blind my sleepy eyes. I have watched her, pen to paper, writing black words in a black notepad with black pages. I could never read what she writes. Though, she writes of the heart and mind’s disobedience, night and day, so high up in the head of the young man. And she need never change that young man (not by drugs, not by an operation or change of clothes), because each day it is she—it is always she—who observes the sun and those masters of music, those slow soaring black birds. She wrote once that she hated all men (a part of love was in that declaration), and then she wrote (halfway before she stopped) that she hated all women (a part of lust was apparent in that feeling). But she changes so much in her tower. And I give her all the time in the world. The sun is not as constant as we make it out to be. Its flux of moods both close and distant wears the woman down the way a rocky relationship with a prodigal son might do. I often walk away from her plot of earth and erected prison (I don’t want to call it that because that’s not right, not exactly) when I speak to a woman I want, using the young man’s lips (hers from the beginning). But, so clear it is to me, the old woman is a lover of women (a matter of fact; it is also romantic). Late in her development, she ruled finally that men do nothing for her in that way. She even tried to return to those most temporal inklings of passion for men but nothing came forward. It was silly but also in her stomach she suffered a wearisome cringing. Men, especially, and sometimes animals had done so much of violence for her and not for her; against her; inside her; to kill her right where she (for whatever short while) was and is so powerfully, so fully alive, inside this young man who also cringes against all battles. She is a lover of women, and as I think her the greater voice of my being, let her recite unabashedly to my loves and me what she has written and countless times revised. She comes to her mind.