Waking with a vague horror of selfhood – as my brain kicks in, I see the various gates and plumes and pissy turnstiles of others, as if the self were over there… slowly, inexorably entering it…

Seeing H and O yesterday in the White Horse… is it that I don’t want to understand what that (was, is) for me – emotionally – what it was, love, what it is – retour?

I couldn’t love anyone then… couldn’t understand what you were to me…all I was capable of was exploiting love, she said.

My pockets are full of one-way tickets.

O was drunk, talking about illusion. H gave us each a copy of her recent book of verse. Oh, yes, illusion, she inscribed O’s copy – illusion… and then. O said: see, she still has problems, she still adds an and then – that is her illusion. (O remains a dogmatic Buddhist.)

The White Horse is a café at the edge of the market. The door says we await you. White Bulgarian wine, white chocolate, coffee and cognac after, O drinking mug after mug of cheap local beer.

We got there through the crowded market… I was searching for a converter for a Russian telephone plug, H for tomatoes and potatoes for her son. At first she avoided my eyes… while she was buying blue-eyed potatoes I remarked on this to O – in the café, he pointed this out to her and she looked into my eyes. She has not changed much, the same red hair and huge green irises and skin the hue of unpasteurised milk…

So we sat and talked… she gave me a little kiss, even. I felt… what? Nothing – nothing in the present? Oh, her beauty and brilliance, I suppose… she is calmer now… composed, collected.

A student of psychology at the University here, living in a small room in the dormitory set aside for students with families.

I can still see the hormonal storms raging underneath, O said. Be careful, she’s a woman, she can still show up at your house and it will all begin again –

We talked about poetry and erotica (writing smut – she said it’s sad, unhappy people reading the sexual texts of unhappy people) (and that she is happy now – is that true?) (alone?)

(My Heart Laid Bare) That use of woman. Be careful, she’s a woman, she can still show up… Begin again…

Walking in the gloaming to buy peanuts (the old Soviet kind, raw, ill-kept) … the big split between pedestrians and drivers (the old Soviet dream, a car – when money wouldn’t get you an apartment, the car was a desperately developed little world, the ultimate status symbol, the sole private place, like for high school drivers back [the word home crossed out]) …

Craig, who made the averse pentagram of blood silver I wear as amulet, with his expensively tattooed back (the witches’ sabbath), was flying to Seattle when an ex-military type sat next to him and asked him have you ever been in the military. Craig said nothing, then remembered my story about the barricades in Riga in 1991. No, Craig answered the man, no, but I was on the wall… against the Russians… in Daugavpils.

Craig would often speak of making up one’s past. The little girl in Robbe-Grillet’s Project for a Revolution in New York: “why should I tell the truth, when for every little truth there are millions and millions of lies?”

A week or so ago… in the Quashas’ kitchen… we were talking about my old lover (an old lover… (…

Oh, tree. (There are still some ancient poplars along the levee, but Allée Street is no longer an allée…) Oh, tree. Truths, branches, false branches… forms of address.

I still obey RK’s dictum write everything. Everything as opposed to anything.

The Latvian word spilgts. Brilliance, glare. Spilgts piemers, striking example, striking instance. A striking instance. I lay abed softly speaking to my phallus, not two hours ago, not touching myself – wherever lust is – and memory mixed with vision to form… form (entrances, pissy turnstiles, gates) – – – the old life, images and sometimes even visions that had a demonic function, arabesques and fatal nativity scenes… your eyes. What does yours mean, in this sense?

Address. That I (used to) believe that… I… was… drawn… out. I am a different – creature – when I am so drawn. What I say is different when I – it is not aim… … … Give… When I give of myself.

I am afraid of your history, A said. That was long ago, about two weeks ago, in Cambridgeport. A drove me from Harvard Square to Springfield, I was trying to… seduce her?

Fidelity – I lack? “The heart has a chastity the mind might envy.” – RK. I do not lack fidelity – but then, what is it? Hi old lover. Where are you. Distances, absences. And then there is this home – I think of the Georgian saying: you cannot call yourself a man until you plant a tree, kill a snake, raise a son. Home is planted trees, the sand-thorn next to the fence I built, the apple trees, the cherries. Is watering the garden, guarding the marriage-bed… did I fail, there?

O said: why don’t you look into his eyes? H answered: never look a snake in the eyes.

A swimmer, a man treading water. A man lying in the water. Sinks, bobs, is lapped at, drowned, flies. Oh touch me in a certain way. Certainty, then, perhaps, more than honesty. A man is lying in the water. For every one truth. Narrative, straitening, Engführung. The narrative of the man who is drawn out, a picture book, clouds swollen like the hands of addicts, eyes out of focus. A dissolute kindliness o’erspreads her queendom.

You emotional slut, L wrote. Where did you want to take me… alcoholic coma?

The old life – the history of the birch trees (Wehrmacht, 1941), unseasonably warm temperatures immediately before my arrival – now it is ievu laiks, the time of the bird-cherry trees, the temperature drops. This is rationally explained in the newspaper. Meteorologists deny that the bird-cherry trees are to blame for the cold weather.

He sits and suffers nightmares. There is a man in the water. How deeply he breathes and the weight of his bones. His skin is the color of an iceberg.

The old life, davai. I do not lack fidelity. He is drowning in his nightmares.

I am afraid of your history. It is a simple matter. A woman with beautiful hands touches your tailbone or penis, stares into your heart – six years later, she says I couldn’t love anyone, all I could do was use men. And I came from here. A glaring instance of love.

Very tired, herring marinated, in the gloaming the proliferation of stores, the neighbours hung the flag today 8 May, that is still a difference like Easter, grand political debate as to whether we celebrate the defeat of Fascism on 8 May or 9 May, 9 May when the Germans surrendered to the Soviets, 8 May when the “rest of the world” celebrates it… and there was nothing to celebrate here. Old Peteris Eermanis poem, how the bells are ringing in Paris and Prague, in London and the Hague, and here no bells rang, here the war ended forty-six years later, if then. If then. My mother is afraid there will be another war. “Pepper on your tongue!”

The official unemployment rate in Daugavpils is only slightly above that of the rest of Latvia, yet among those… in the know… it is more like a third of the population. (Disraeli: “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”) The numbers are manipulated – who is unemployed? Workers who go to Germany, Gastarbeiter?

The old meat processor – the big ugly building across from the closest tram stop – has been turned into a “little market,” confusing hallways lead to tubs full of live carp, dairy counters, here and there an abacus, coffee from Scandinavia, mineral water, necessities, French perfume. The only payphone I have been able to discover anywhere near here.

Oh again again: TRY ANOTHER WORLD quoth the billboard in Beneix’s film La Lune dans le Caniveau – when I came here, I wandered around with my mouth open for at least a month. I was in awe.

A long time ago, A drove me to Springfield on a delightfully vernal day – two weeks ago – and wrestled with her mind, to come or not to come (“our bodies remember what our minds do not even perceive”) –

The throat as a nativity scene, Styrofoam and frescoes, darling… what is want?

The throat as a nativity scene, I stare into your eyes and see. Once there was a woman everything she said was a lie. And her lies were so lovely that her suitors rapped at sodden doors in every corner of her queendom, she could turn anyone into a suitor with a bare bout of fixation, yes, and all of it was meant for me like Kafka’s door. Again again quest’ansia di amare, yes, the anxious desire for love. Certain illusions are an amber compote. Don’t be so hard on yourself.

A long time ago, A drove me to Springfield. Ah Springfield, how I will remember you, a slice of shitty pizza and a beer, Icehouse, and all alone again a bus into the Lake of Albany, headed for Quashastan – fate means that at every significant point in my life of late I head for the same little room above the Tibetan altar in Barrytown and… A drove me, her body wracked by fleshly memory. I desired. Many years later – it is like hearing Orson Welles in a Paul Masson commercial: we will sell no wine before its time.

Tu esi zirga. You are on horseback. You are on time, you are on top of things, you know where you’re at. All around you things swirl and howl, do they not, you know what the fuck you’re about, there are no loose ends, it is your heart we are