marginalia

The Hudson Review, Inc

MarginaliaAuthor(s): Deborah WarrenSource: The Hudson Review, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Autumn, 2008), pp. 490-491Published by: The Hudson Review, IncStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20464904 .

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490 THE HUDSON REVIEW

Les Ruines du Visage

-La Fontaine, "La Fille"

Among my past acquaintances, a handful two or three-of the girls I used to know had the kind of faces that at sight stopped a passer-by mid-step, mid-sentence. A room woke up when they'd come in; and leaving, they'd leave a hole in the room when they would go.

I had one friend in whom that kind of beauty rose like a revelation in her skin; I'll see her-after forty years-tonight. Forty years! I can't put off the evening, but I'd rather tell the room to shut its eyes and turn its face to the wall when she walks in.

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Finding an old book on a basement shelf gray, spine bent-and reading it again, I met my former, unfamiliar, self, some of her notes and scrawls so alien

that, though I tried, I couldn't get (behind this gloss or that) back to the time she wrote to guess what experiences she had in mind, the living context of some scribbled note;

or see the girl beneath the purple ink who chose this phrase or that to underline, the mood, the boy, that lay behind her thinking but they were thoughts I recognized as mine;



DEBORAH WARREN 491

and though there were words I couldn't even read, blobs and cross-outs; and though not ajot remained of her old existence-I agreed with the young annotator's every thought:

A clever girl. So what would she see fit to comment on-and what would she have to say about the years that she and I have written since-before we put the book away?



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