Stone, stone, steel bones, a thin door. Put this together as you like. It isn't anyway, how I saw it. No doubt about any of it, now, especially Proust. Humble little grave, almost mysteriously so, but it is the mosaic (far left) that truly mystifies me. One finds them everywhere, stuck to the eleventh-century walls in St. Germain. The last, the omega of this short sequence, is of the cold door behind which Wilde now resides.

I expect I went for confirmation. I wonder what it would have been like, to have read all that, had I begun with such a confirmation. I wonder whether I would have had the courage to see it through. Yes, I suppose.

There is a bridge I cross every day, hundreds of miles away from the above. I have no notion of why I am writing about it now, save that it insists I must. Run your hands along the rail and you'll feel the chill that lives on in all metal in all weather. Why do you withdraw your hand? Is it that the chill you find there can't wait to jump up into you? Yes, doubltessly, and better to cross over the river and get on with errands. Yeah, go buy bread, go buy some oranges, a pair of slippers.

This summer we found a hawk feather. C. wore it in her hat proudly. This was the only time I can remember not seeing her slouch when she walked. We walked for ten miles. We walked past ruins and bushes. We went along the ridgelines. We went down into hollows, past what must have been little stone washhouses. We went up the steeple. We went up the steeple stairs hoping the wood underfoot wouldn't explode under our weight. We went up the steeple steps and scratched our names in the daub and wattle alongside the names from one hundred years ago. We rang the bell dully with our bare knuckles. We stirred the wasps and took a few photos. We started our way down. But we looked out acros the land before we did. And saw September looming up high over the Pyrenees throwing its shadow all the way up to Paris and, when we were in Paris, we found it still there in the stones and the railings of Pont Neuf and we walked down deep into it very late one night, the only ones on Boulevard Raspail, walking deeper into it thought at the hour it only looked like night.

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