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Date 14-NOV 19:08:00:65
From: Catia
To: Merlino
Subj: sogni
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il tempo ha denudato gli alberi da cui avevo preso le ultime foglie d'autunno. Sono nuda davanti a te, adesso, amore
time has turned the trees
nude where I seized
the last leaves of autumn
now am I likewise
nude before you
finally love
Translated these lines from a distant, impossible lover in days in which I now realize I had gone mad with love and loneliness; the entry before recalls my pact with my mother about heaven; the entry before that quotes Cixous’ “The Author in Truth” about “a text written with final energies, the last breath.” Within two weeks of these entries, I write again (on Thanksgiving!) believing that I have had a vision of my mother embodied in a great oak (“the witch's tree”) which I hugged tearfully feeling her girth and thinking she had kept her deathbed promise to let me, her eldest son (a daughter before me dead at birth my father carried in his arms to her hidden grave, the sole pallbearer), know whether there was a heaven (this the pact). I am still certain it was her.
The next day another distant, also impossible, lover cast the I Ching for me and then sent the following note:
“I found the cast of the question about you. 46 Pushing Upward changing to 32 Duration. The image:
‘Within the earth, wood grows
The image of Pushing Upward
Thus the superior man of devoted character
Heaps up small things
In order to achieve something high and great’
Later she wrote: Looking back I'm suddenly (not) surprised by the image I chose for the haiku which still won't work:
In the earth, the roots
grip, grow stronger as their trees
defy stuntedness
In the days since I wrote this section, she has been diagnosed with an inoperable and untreatable cancer. She lives still by a river with her mother who has come over the sea where she is looked in upon by women newly acquainted who have taken on her care and friendship. This is no fiction.