in mid-August

"Sometimes I'd like nothing better than to get away and come to Paris, to feel you touch my hand, how you touch me completely with flowers and then not to know yet again where you come from and where you are going.  To me you come from India or from a more distant dark, brown land, to me you are the desert and the sea and everything secretive. I know nothing about about and that is why I am often so afraid for you, I cannot imagine that you are doing the same things the rest of us are doing here, I should have a castle for us and bring you to me, so that you can be my enchanted lord, we will have many tapestries in it and music and invent love. I have often thought that "Corona" is your most beautiful poem, it is the most perfect anticipation of a moment where everything becomes marble and exists forever. But here it is not my "time".  I hunger for something that I will not get, everything is flat and vapid. Tired and used-up even before it is used.  In mid-August I will be in Paris just for a few days. Don't ask me why, but be there for me, for one evening, or two or three. Take me to the Seine, we want to look down into it for a long time until we've become small fish and recognize each other again."

 - Ingeborg Bachmann in a letter to Paul Celan, June 24, 1949. Trans. David Vickrey.