U is for Utah, the western surround of my indispensable tedium and, in many ways, its inspiration. Utah is everything that my life before moving there was not. It is slow, which gives my tedium its requisite lack of energy. Charles Wright says somewhere, "There's so little to say, and so much time in which to say it." Well, Utah gives one that feeling in the dryness and harshness of its terrain, in the largeness of its sky, in its yellow-and-redness V is for Vergil, who took what was a fleeting bit of background music in Homer, that strain of elegy, and made it the central, inescapable condition of the Aeneid. All those exquisite passages of lament and exhaustion, of time passing and life lost, all that elegiac grace that seems to make of the Aeneid a long lyric, mark Vergil as the first great gardener in the landscape of grief, and the father of pastoral elegy. Is it a negligible irony or not that our vision of pastoral elegy derives so much from the beauty of the Underworld? I know only that any description of landscape has within it an elusiveness, an unobtainableness that goes beyond the seasonal cycles and what they mean, and that suggests something like the constant flourishing of a finality in which we are confronted with the limits of our feeling. We end up lamenting the loss of something we never possessed. W is for what might have been or what I might have written. Can I be influenced by what I might have done but didn't?--as if the choice to write what I couldn't or didn't were still before me. It is not as if what I might have written exists, even as a possibility. Still, I sometimes say to myself that if I hadn't done this, I might have done that, even if I don't know what that might be. What I might have written stands in shadowy, sober judgement of what I have written. It gathers whatever self it has and comes, unbidden, to visit me. W is also for what I would never have written because I could not have, even in a thousand years. A conceivable source of unhappiness, it is in fact a relief. Think if I had written the first hundred or so lines in Book XIII of the 1805 Prelude, what a great poet I would be. I would have to destroy everything else I had written to keep people from saying, "What a falling off there has been in Strand's work." So I wouldn't be me, and I would not have my poems, and I would have nothing to worry about. W is for Wordsworth, who wrote what I didn't and couldn't and won't. -- 「你下流贱格，露出半个龟头。」 --

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