Deirdre O'Connor

Though there's no such thing as a "self," I missed it— the fiction of it and how I felt believing in it mildly like a book an old love sent with an inscription in his hand, whatever it meant, After such knowledge, what forgiveness . . . —the script of it like the way my self felt learning German words by chance— Mitgefühl, Unheimlichkeit —and the trailing off that happened because I knew only the feelings, abstract and international, like ghosts or connotations lacking a grammar, a place to go: this was the way my self felt when it started falling apart: each piece of it clipped from a garden vaguely remembered by somebody unrecognizable— such a strange bouquet that somebody sent to nobody else, a syntax of blossoms.