Excerpts from a writer’s museumi
This apartment, now a museum,
once the place in which he’d lived
with family, but privately,
and interrogated his existence,
and written copiously.
Here, only the shutters and window-frames
and the street beyond them
bore witness to how he worked
and smoked and seldom slept,
his various selves mutating, conversing,
each having emerged
intact, fully-formed, from the rooms
of another world inside him.
ii
In death, as in life, his person
almost an abstraction, he’s pacing
the corridor, pausing to read
through steel-rimmed spectacles
the handwriting – fluid, once his –
on the open page of the notebook
inside the display cabinet:
The barest trace of a smile, thin and sad,
at the compelling absurdity
of an argument he’s already forgotten
and ceased, by now, to care about.
iii
By now the tourists, the devout,
the merely curious, have left.
The dark-eyed receptionist looks up,
returns to tidying her desk:
She doesn’t see him – or if she does –
she’s grown quite used to him.
Something in her smile, her quiet
demeanour, reminds him of a love
he knew only fleetingly.
iv
After she’s left,
he hears the sound of her footsteps
disappearing with the shape
of her aura down the cobbled streets.
Lighting, out of habit, another
cigarette, he’s there, as before,
in the dust-particled air
of his former solitude.
But something is troubling him, lately,
something in the smile
of the dark-eyed receptionist.
Had he been mistaken
while among the living,
to trade love or its possibility,
for a life of solitude and reflection?
The fruits of such a life:
unfinished texts and papers
from a trunk full of writing, the puzzle
of his discrete identities,
now mapped out around him
like innumerable constellations,
luminous fragments of all he dreamed into being.
- Eduard Burle
