The Reinvention of Love

watched the endless procession of death carts, each one piled high with bodies.
    “I couldn’t stop watching,” says George, when she comes to say goodbye on her way to her country estate. “I sat at my window all day. It was so compelling, and I felt obliged to witness this last journey of the poor souls who had died. I just can’t stand to see any more death.”
    I worry for Adèle, but I hear no word of her fate.

I HAVE WRITTEN ANOTHER book of poems. It was completed quite soon after
Livre d’amour
was published privately and borrowed much from that book. In the introduction I have written that friendship is still the main subject of the verses, even if it is not, any longer, a single dominant friendship.
    What a convenient word “friendship” is. It is a blanket to throw over one’s more naked feelings.
    I have called the little book
Pensées d’août
. The title is literal, as I did write much of the book at the end of a summer. August is the hinge between summer and autumn, a time of bittersweet change. The days are still warm, but there is the awareness that winter is coming, and one day, just in one day, everything changes and one wakes to find that the air has a chill in it, and that a coat is now required in the evenings. I think that this is the natural season for contemplation, and that poetry comes from this spiritual August – this place between loss and arrival. The emotion disappears and the word moves in to take its place. The last flowers of August thrive in the last of the summer heat, but they will not bloom again until spring. When one walks through the gardens and sees them, the joy at their existence is balanced, in equal measure, by the sorrow of their imminent departure.
    Is this not the very condition of the human soul? Is this not what people hold within them at all times, this delicate balance of happiness and melancholy?
    The difference between this book and
Livre d’amour
is thatthe former was written in the midst of love and hopefulness, while
Pensées d’août
is composed from the ashes of that love. Because of this,
Pensées d’août
is a very difficult book to write. Every time I sit down before the blank page, I must visit this loss, must experience it anew. It leaves me shaken, and sometimes, at the end of the day, the page on which the poem is written is blotted with my tears.
    Sadness is selfish. It wants you all to itself. I shun human company, preferring the quiet consort of books. Every day when I write I feel that I am using up the words I have in me for that day, and therefore I have nothing left for conversation. My time is spent in this melancholy absorption, and it is not entirely unpleasant. The poems take my sorrow. They take all of it, and they transform it into something tangible.
    I believe that poetry is about honesty. Say the thing that can’t be said, and, if possible, say it right up front. During the writing of this book I take my signet ring to my jeweller and have him engrave the word “truth” on it. This is what I will wear on my body until my death, this single, implacable word. In English.
    But truth is individual. My truth is not anyone else’s. What I write is not necessarily to be believed, or to be appreciated by the people who read my poems.
    So I write about myself, my feelings. My little book of verse does not sell nearly as well as the books by the great champions of the people – Hugo and Balzac – because, if you do not care to read about my emotions, then you will not care about my poems.
    I am not clever like Victor, who pretends he is not writing about himself but is speaking on behalf of “the people”. Really, his regard for himself is so large that it can be satisfied only by this idea that he is the voice for all humanity.
    My book appears, enjoys a few reviews, and then disappears from the public’s interest. One day, in a small second-handbookshop not far from my old neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-des-Champs, I find a copy of
Pensées d’août
. I feel terrible that my book has been bought and dispensed with so soon after publication, so I purchase the copy. When I get home I riffle through the pages, looking for some clue as to why the owner of my little book would want to discard it so callously. There is no name inscribed on the flyleaf, no notes in the margins. The book is pristine and unmarked. But several of the pages have been carefully cut from the middle of the volume. I take down my copy of
Pensées