tooknap press

Dear Avital Ronell,

It's good to see you here on Facebook.
Sorry I never came to pick up the essay I wrote for you
on the Blanchotian hotel. It was such torture to write.
Thank you for giving me an A, forgiving me an A.
I wish I could see now what I wrote.

I still occasionally have dreams with you in them.
In the last one, I took a bus to attend class at the local art school,
Your renovated farmhouse.  It was wintry cold;
I stood and waited by the bus stop's white picket fence.
Your pets, thin, European twenty-somethings,
smoked and milled about in corduroys, shooting pool.
After class, we drank brandy out of large snifters
in the basement (your pied-a-terre) while you held court,
folding your legs underneath you indian-style
as if it were 1974. 

Usually in these dreams I've forgotten
what day and time class is being held,
or I haven't read the difficult text.
You're always so understanding, even when
I'm certain you'll you'll tell me
I can't come to class anymore.

The work you assign is impenetrable,
always on the threshold of a discipline
foreign yet familiar enough that
I sense it to be a part of my own body.
Something mine but that I don't completely
understand. An organ that keeps me alive
but that I'm never quite able to see clearly
from the outside.

I wrote for you that threshold of knowing,
that corridor, I think, although I didn't know it
at the time. While writing, I developed a fever,
and after I was sure you had received a copy,
I made certain to erase the file.