WILL SALMON
WERTHER
Or the lyric present’s
passed, and I
have wasted my life,
letting the book fall so all
the pages disconnect
from the spine, a bird
falling so fast from the air
that its feathers attain
fluxity, unfixity, and I’ve always
given pause to the way
Goethe killed
Werther at his writing
desk, or that Werther killed
himself at his writing desk,
letting the pages
of his letters fall as he
fell, the way I
picture it, forming a sort of cloud
on the ground that
his hand, like
a bird, might
pass through, Goethe’s way
of saying I am
him, or he, object
or subject of a sentence
he couldn’t quite
master, couldn’t quite decide
which side he was
approaching from, the first person
to speak themselves
as a word, or to be spoken
as a word, conscious-
ly, spit hanging
like a syllable from his
lower lip. They say
the mouth is massive
in the mind’s
homunculus, but I
can’t feel my mouth
now, not even
as I’m speaking. Does the bird, in
flying, think of itself
as flying, or does it just
do it? A shuttered
outsideness, this window
confronting its shadow—half-
shadow—on the wall. The distinction
doesn’t matter. The plane
between the lyric and the narrative
impulse, I mean,
the pane.