Journal d'un homme vide Three Aprils ago the road was the best escape, the sea beyond      the road might have been a moat, and across its hundred      trecherous miles some dream wilderness, ancient green distances. To stay would have meant the death by proximities. To have been too close to her, to the places of us, to an old me. Certain that going was the only way to leave her, myself, all that I had to be far from so I could survive even the obvious threats like winter. After the road and sea, another road, smaller, a lane perhaps, up into hills of extinct tribes. Then stone towns where such innovations as a twentieth century had not yet been introduced. That was all to the good. In one empty sandstone house I waited out the smashed foot the foodless      days the loveless months. Borrowed a radio and heard Prokofiev's      third piano concerto. Found another road, lost it again and the hills       closed in. A way of camping in a feedshed, the sleepingbag on high      bales of hay, waking at five to frost, mist, ghostly sheep, and, past the farm fence, miles from quiet Osterley, an icy baptism in winter's rivers. Spending a season of this type, meeting hundreds of strangers, a State, the last land before the ice age, even her way of smiling through me or the ache that beach summer cannot quite dispel faded a little and finally to return was only a journey, was the ritual of roads leading to doors which, though, still remember not to open to the uncertain tapping of numb poethands in the plae season far from being winter which I shall rather term regret

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