Returning to the room: I notice how all your word- plays, calculated ploys of the body, the witticisms of touch, are now attempts to keep me at a certain distance and (at length) avoid admitting I am here I watch you watching my face indifferently yet with the same taut curiosity with which you might regard a suddenly discovered part of your own body: a wart perhaps, and I remember that you said in childhood you were a tracer of maps (not making but) moving a pen or a forefinger over the courses of the rivers, the different colours that mark the rise of mountains; a memorizer of names (to hold these places in their proper places) So now you trace me like a country’s boundary or a strange new wrinkle in your own wellknown skin and I am fixed, stuck down on the outspread map of this room, of your mind’s continent (here and yet not here, like the wardrobe and the mirrors the voices through the wall your body ignored on the bed), transfixed by your eyes’ cold blue thumbtacks
