You spent the evening nuancing conflicting accounts of human nature and the social contract for me. I am writing a class on The Need for Roots and I am not served well by my education so far. For Hobbes, we are murderous. For Rousseau, we are peaceful. I fall asleep in your arms as you read aloud from Leviathan. I look last at my clock at quarter to two. The next morning after you leave for work , I read The Apple Trees At Olema instead of writing my class. I think about Hass’ wife. At Aldeburgh he told me that she loved Weil too. Then, as I flick absently back from later poems, I fall on ‘Concerning the Afterlife, the Indians of Central California Had Only the Dimmest Notions’. Here I read:

After breakfast
you will swim and I am going to read
that hard man Thomas Hobbes
on the causes of the English civil wars.
There are no women in his world,
Hobbes, brothers fighting brothers
over goods.


I try to write my class again (I’ll only finish when you sit beside me, looking at my notes, coaxing it out of me) and then I give up and I leave for work too.