Saskia Hamilton

When the collie saw the child break from the crowd, he gave chase, and since they both were border-crossers, they left this world. We were then made of— affronted by—silence. The train passed Poste 5, Paris, late arrival, no luck, no enlarging commentary magnified in any glass. “The ineffable is everywhere in language” the speaker had said in the huge hall where I sat amongst coughers, students, in the late February of that year, at the end of a sinuous inquiry on sense and sound— “and very close to the ground,” he’d said. Like mist risen above the feet of animals in a far field north of here.

I passed through, I should have paused, there were a hundred doors. One opened. In there, someone whose name is not yet known to me lived out his middle years in simple terms, two chairs, one place laid for early breakfast, one plate with dry toast and butter softening. There his mind raced through writings he had memorized long ago while he tried to get hold of himself. Once in his youth he had studied with love in the corners of old paintings matrices of fields and towns, passages intricate and particular, wheat, columns, figures and ground, classically proportioned in lines that were meant to meet, eventually, at vanishing point. They continued, nevertheless; they troubled the eye. He collected sets of books printed in the nineteenth century, unyielding pages, memoirs of the poets, engravings of rurified private subjects in times of public sector unhappiness, frescoes of human oddity in gatefold printing. Why does it continue to chasten me, he says to no one. It does. It is a painful mistaking, this setting something down, saying aloud, “it is nothing yet” when he’d meant, not anything— but then nothing peered through the keyhole, nothing took possession. Snow on the roofs, snow in traces on the ground, passersby with wet trouser-cuffs looking to the pavement as the hill rises, light gathering in the river and gradually spreading.