Letter to Dr. B - I have found you among the texts (but not the textures) of your life, in the library of your cunning, where the abstracts of forty papers open, one by one, like small windows partly sealed by terminology's lacquer. They reveal you both aloof and enthralled, a restless mind of intersecting planes. How can I resist the paper "Artist and Analyst"? Yet I do, thinking it best to stay within the frame we've chosen, using the palette we invent, creating a mosaic in motion. Whenever I set a shard in place, the mosaic evolves, blurs a moment, then a new scene refines, throwing past into relief, drawing present into mind. So I will sacrifice my yen to know the what and whim of you. Though my curiosity is swelling like a Magellanic Cloud filled with a luminous starfield of questions, I'll sacrifice them on the altar of our ineffable cause. A padded altar. A cause quilted with passion, and insight whose razors cut clean as thrill. A sacrifice intoxicating as any pill. Pandora's Sunday Morning You appear in darkness, like the slowly forming crystals of remembered thought, eyelessly, where the brain paints neon brush strokes and phantoms prowl among symbols of unrest. While I am treading the fragile catwalk between sleep and wakefulness, you appear without your glasses out in your usual chair. I sit across from you in a floral dress. The air trembles with the thick smoke of emotion as, sitting quite still, I struggle hard towards you: an elation like love and not like love, a waking trance for two powered by the interplay of heart and mind harnessed to work in unison. I also sense danger alive as the arms of a great river closing on the soft embankments of my life, muscling into sanity. I have no word for this tug-of-war whose silk rasps fiery knots through my ribs. The verb lies somewhere between tempt and fear . It is not like a moaning, but urgent as tears. I imagine you can hear it humming in my bones. (Continues...) Excerpted from Origami Bridges by Diane Ackerman Copyright © 2003 by Diane Ackerman Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
