Lecture Notes

A difficult student, I didn’t see 

the Giottos when in Florence, didn’t

visit walled Padua. The galleries 

I did enter I strolled through like aisles 

at the grocer when one isn’t hungry. 

Appetite widens with time. When I read

Kafka, the pictured objects and landscapes   

possess a degree of limitlessness.

I move through his immense fields of tension,

impossible machines, feel an inner

tightening. It is night in the text, nine 

evenings in Kafka’s October. As though 

a lacquered glass architecture was laid,

forced atop the heretofore existing 

structures of a dark hillside. Looking through

glass is like listening to dialogue 

in another language—latching onto  

familiar verbs and prepositions—

a pleasant sense of stupefaction like 

childhood—thinking the eye isn’t seen

by what it sees—already through the glass 

an irreversible change transmitted—