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44 Today, clipping the privet hedge, I felt his gaze on the nape on my neck, that subtle sense the hairline has . . . how would topiary translate? but the moment I turned he dissolved like sugar into milk, like shadow into dusk. Whenever he smiles something escapes me. Wilson On Not Reading Rilke He goes on waiting, stupefied by hours of fluorescent light and milk glass shades in a library oppressed by the weight of shelved theses. Having drawn down all the blinds against the immanent eclipse he crosses his ankles and reclines as if for a board room portrait, tracing the repeating pattern in silk, neither listless nor alert but slack as a deckchair widow cruising the Aegean. Newly hatched, aphid-green, a lacewing on the pelmet eases open its wings and the moon turns black, black as frostbite, gnawing inch by inch till the corona sears and scorches everything into being,
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Wilson being itself no metaphor. As for the body, the capsule he imagines himself to be, how can it intervene, what interpose when the solar wind flares earthward? He goes on waiting, waiting to see. The Midnight Scholar works on little-known poems – 4th and 5th century Chinese Du Tzu and Fung Xi are his speciality. It’s extremely unlikely you’ll have heard of them. He puts his versions on the web and corresponds with students doing PhDs in Nairobi and the Philippines who ask about the more obscure classical allusions. Actually he doesn’t speak a word of Cantonese or Mandarin, but likes making notes 45

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Today, clipping the privet hedge, I felt his gaze on the nape on my neck, that subtle sense the hairline has . . . how would topiary translate? but the moment I turned he dissolved like sugar into milk, like shadow into dusk. Whenever he smiles something escapes me.

Wilson

On Not Reading Rilke

He goes on waiting, stupefied by hours of fluorescent light and milk glass shades in a library oppressed by the weight of shelved theses. Having drawn down all the blinds against the immanent eclipse

he crosses his ankles and reclines as if for a board room portrait, tracing the repeating pattern in silk, neither listless nor alert but slack as a deckchair widow cruising the Aegean.

Newly hatched, aphid-green, a lacewing on the pelmet eases open its wings and the moon turns black, black as frostbite, gnawing inch by inch till the corona sears and scorches everything into being,

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