Necessities of Life

Lyrics

Piece by piece I seem to re-enter the world: I first began a small, fixed dot, still see that old myself, a dark-blue thumbtack pushed into the scene, a hard little head protruding from the pointillist's buzz and bloom. After a time the dot begins to ooze. Certain heats melt it. Now I was hurriedly blurring into ranges of burnt red, burning green, whole biographies swam up and swallowed me like Jonah. Jonah! I was Wittgenstein Marry Wollstonecraft, the soul of Louis Jouvet, dead in a blown-up photograph. Till, wolfed almost to shreds, I learned to make myself unappetizing. Scaly as a dry bulb thrown into a cellar I used myself, let nothing use me. Like being on a private dole, sometimes more like kneading bricks in Egypt. What life was there, was mine, now and again to lay one hand on a warm brick and touch the sun's ghost with economical joy, now and again to name over the bare necessities So much for those days. Soon practice may make me middling-perfect, I'll dare inhabit the world trenchant in motion as an eel, solid as a cabbage-head. I have invitations: a curl of mist steams upward from a field, visible as my breath, houses along a road stand waiting like old women knitting, breathless to tell their tales.