From Mz N: the serial

Like all children Mz N lived in archaic mythic zones and all the neighbors and kin played their parts to a T although they never were able to tell her the whole story. § The child Mz N sat on her bed and wondered: that tree outside her window shifted when her eye shifted. What to make of that? § Mz N and her siblings had a dog for some time. They went on vacation & when they came back no dog. They asked the parents: the dog? who replied: what dog? And some people wonder why others distrust the obvious. § One year Mz N began her great project of investigative touch. Like everything it came about through reading and happenstance. Mz N had a friend who said I do it and then I worry what if my roommate hears? What if? Mz N wondered went home and discovered a new octave. § Mz N sometimes thinks what N stands for: Nothing. One day she said nihilism in school & the teacher paused, chalk between her fingers like her longed-for cigarette. What's nīhilism another student said I thought it was neehilism. This was another example of Mz N bringing up topics that went Nowhere. § the blackest black is not so black it cannot take a blacker black so Mz N thinks the void would speak if void could speak or of color think Mz N is writing what she hopes will be a masterpiece:Mispronunciation: the definitive autobiography. She only includes the bloopers she remembers. She is very strict like that. What's vá-gi-na —hard g— she called to her parents age five when they'd plopped her on the sofa with a picture book to help her learn where babies. Some years later she told a story at dinner about being very angry with a persecuting teacher. I spoke she sd with great ve-hé-mence. Her father laughed a somewhat unkind laugh and asked her to repeat it. She did & once again he laughed. Mz N vehemently objects to the making fun of children who struggle every day to get their words and bodies aligned § one day after sex in a century of bad sex the other one asked Mz N did I leave you on the edge never having had an orgasm as far as she knew she sd quite definitively no how would she know such an edge are you sure the other persisted Mz N thought again she could say quite definitively oh yes here I am on the edge where you left me the edge of a certain abyss but this she knew was the answer to a question no one was asking § Mz N embarks one day upon a sonnet attracted by the knowledge that it's dead extinct like dinosaur dodo or bonnet long replaced by baseball caps on heads that centuries ago were piled with curls birds powder wires and such machinery 'twould blow the minds of tattooed boys and girls who cruise the streets of this new century Mz N concedes she's antiquarian old hat old news—"hoarder of ancient dirt" to quote the mouldy Scot John Pinkerton but from her dead-end path she won't divert the airplane made the train a living fossil relict herself she listens for its whistle § Wordsworth never took a plane but Mz N takes a plane with Wordsworth on her mind and other matters: love, fear, a wish to die. Wordsworth had a very sturdy mind and legs that took him far into the mountains, Scottish glens, German towns and yes across the Alps. Mz N has never seen the Alps nor Snowdon nor a mountain anywhere beyond the ancient Adirondacks Wordsworth too she thinks would like their worndown humps their pathless woods the rowboats by the shores of placid lakes ready for exploring. Young Wordsworth stole a rowboat rowed out on a lake one night and found himself appalled the mountain strode sublime after him and he trembled and his mind as Burke had said it would before sublimity near failed. There are passages in life in Wordsworth he called spots of time and Mz N has some spots she sometimes recollects. But now she's happy incredulous in love and in strange anguish wants to recollect nothing.If it were now to die 'twere now to be most happy she murmurs with the engine nearly exploding with the fragility and perverse strength of all that lives and moves and has its being in the air on the ground in the sea. Having reached a floating state of grace, surprised by joy she wants to die life can only get worse the mountain receding below them as they climb