Dear Lowell

this evening as i toppled a stack of books, an anxious letter spilled out of The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. it was written a very, very, very long time ago, when people still read books.

I transcribe it here as found:

July, 1975

Lowell –

I think of you reading Nijinsky's Diary. I think of sending it to you as a present – to what address? Your mother will know. It is out-of-print, inexpensive now, incoherent, only a human document. Nijinsky would be pleased and not pleased, the same as you, or differently, but to the same effect. The University of California press is a good press. It published Mary Barnard's Sappho.

I will tell you what I am doing. For some reason I was disappointed by my last visit – I lost faith with you. Now I am living with a young writer who is going to Iowa in the fall. he is leaving me I think. It is no matter. We are in Cincinnati where he lives. His mother is dead & her ashes are in the living room. It is hard to live up to her although he does not expect it. For two days I worked for a lawyer – as his secretary, as a replacement. And I have worked one day for a bookstore. Mostly, I work at McDonalds – 2 or 3 hours a day – enough to live on.

I hope you are well. I know Anna & Fred will take care of you. I want to come back to you as soon as I can. I an nogotiating for a job as a poet in Jackson, but I am planning to return to law school – at least for a semester more, and then go to writing school.

Jung says a person like you is my animus – I've known that. The thought of you drives me. I know of no literary or actual examples of what you are to me – although Dante had Beatrice and Faust had Helen of Troy and Pound had a host of goddesses. You are an impetus, a cause of movement & development – not a muse.

I am glad to have lived with Bob & with Don. It has made me loose ...

(i'm compelled to stop here and let that misspelling marinate for a second)

... illusions but not desire. I have become more agressive and independent in a physical way. I feel I have always enjoyed a spiritual independence. Don tells me that his roomate, in law school w/ me, warned him I was the oddest law student there. It pleases me.

My love,
Mary