Who begins by quoting Ashbery:
” ‘To meet as far this morning / From the world as agreeing / With it…’
“I could spend all my time thinking about these lines. I could give myself up to them–leave my family, my comfortable life, the dog, lock myself in a cellar or aerie and spend the remainder of my inward-curling days staring at my hands or the sky and trying to understand those lines. Or make an endless list of ways to resolve them and a second endless list of impediments to resolution. Or I could write them on a million slips of paper and eat them, swallow their abyss with my being.
“Among the catalog of horrors you might suffer during pregnancy, the condition called ‘pica’–the urge to ingest non-food items such as ash, plaster, clay, and paper–seems overrepresented in the literature. I think it’s quite rare, but the idea of it is so fantastic–what if you could eat whatever you want, keep it safe by consuming and personally destroying it, like a boy breaks a toy to keep the other kids from playing with it. The world would then really be your oyster–the edible part, I mean, not the pearl, although you could eat that, too, and contain a small moon.”