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39 A Letter to Woyzeck I wake and search that phrase in every thought I have. I sit in the chair where you always sit, and mediate between the window and the mirror. or practise saying I until I can breathe without it. The sun writes left to right, crossing the furniture accumulated into the likeliness of home: the dripping tap, the torn-rimmed jug, floor brush, and handmade wooden crib. It is the objects we own that make life barren. I know if I look through the window, there is a world made of heaps of bone but if I look into the mirror there’s a window, a world of glass where nothing can be seen through. There are times in the afternoon I move the mirror towards the crib, beaming the sun’s reflection onto his sweaty face, listening to those tears fall into place. There are streetlamps and batflights. There are puddles and tunnels, clocks and coffins. There are times and places we once dwelt in but don’t belong to anymore. But what is there there for you, Woyzeck? The sky’s wheel? The cloud’s orbit? And what’s it like, this living once 40 reduced to a few words that haunt tracts of a lifetime still too strange for the tongue to touch? Steady, Woyzeck. There’s no word without a rhyme. There’s the murmuring in the mud. There’s the silence that disintegrates you into parts, bits and scraps, the fly sitting on the back of your palm. There’s the sound of the ebbing river, pebbles taking refuge after the glacier’s final shove. There’s me lowering myself in next to you, hands loosened, a shell the storm has cast up on the strand. ...

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