Break It Down by Lydia Davis Read Free Book Online

the other writing on the page, as though he wrote it at a different time, either before or after the rest. He writes it first, then stops and thinks, his lips tight shut, or looks for the book he will take the poem from—though that is less likely, because he would have it ready in front of him when he sat down to write. Or he thinks after he is done that he will date it. He reads it over, then dates it. Now she notices that he has put her name at the top, with a comma after it, in line with his name below the poem. The date, her name, comma, then the poem, then his name, period. So the poem is the letter.
    Having seen all this, she reads the poem more carefully, several times. There is a word she can’t decipher. It comes at the end of a line so she looks at the rhyme scheme and the word it should rhyme with is pures , pure (pure thoughts), so that the word she can’t read is probably obscures , dark (dark flowers). Then she can’t read
another two words at the beginning of the last line of the octet. She looks at the way he has formed other capital letters and sees that this capital must be L, and the words must be La lune , the moon, the moon that is generous or kind aux insensés —to crazed people.
    What she had seen first and the only words she could remember as she drove north on the highway were compagnon de silence , companion of silence, and some line about holding hands, another about green meadows, prairies in French, the moon, and dying on the moss. She hadn’t seen what she sees this time, that although they have died, or these two in the poem have died, they then meet again, nous nous retrouvions, we found each other again, up above, in something immense , somewhere, which must be heaven. They have found each other crying. And so the poem ends, more or less, we found each other crying, dear companion of silence. She examines the word retrouvions slowly, to make sure of the handwriting, that the letters really spell out finding each other again. She hangs on these letters with such concentration that for a moment she can feel everything in her, everything in the room too, and in her life up to now, gather behind her eyes as though it all depends on a line of ink slanted the right way and another line as rounded as she hopes it is. If there can be no doubt about retrouvions , and there seems to be no doubt, then she can believe that he is still thinking, eight hundred miles from here, that it will be possible ten years from
now, or five years, or, since a year has already passed, nine years or four years from now.
    But she worries about the dying part of it: it could mean he does not really expect to see her again, since they are dead, after all; or that the time will be so long it will be a lifetime. Or it could be that this poem was the closest thing he could find to a poem that said something about what he was thinking about companions, silence, crying, and the end of things, and is not exactly what he was thinking; or he happened on the poem as he was reading through a book of French poems, was reminded of her for a moment, was moved to send it, and sent it quickly with no clear intention.
    She folds up the letter and puts it back in the envelope, lays it on her chest with her hand on top of it, closes her eyes, and after a while, with the light still on, begins to fall asleep. Half dreaming, she thinks that something of his smell may still be in the paper and she wakes up. She takes the paper out of the envelope and unfolds it and breathes deeply the wide white margin at the bottom of the page. Nothing. Then the poem, and she thinks she can smell something there, though she is probably smelling only the ink.

Extracts from a Life
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    Childhood
    I was brought up in the violin factory, and when I had a fight with my brothers and sisters we even used to hit one another with violins.
    If you think of something, do it
    Plenty of people often think, “I’d like to do this,