Four Missing Lines

 This memory thing is getting worse. I thought that crosswords and chess and suchlike were supposed to keep one's faculties fit and alert so God Only Knows what I'd be like without them.

Since other people are reading Romanticism, I thought I'd better have another look. One's own work can suddenly look different with the knowledge that it's out there now and it's too late to change it.

But, what is this? In Escape Artist, a 'stanza' of four lines is missing after the bit about Kind of Blue. It is,

How fashionable ! In Paris 

it meant the world but now 

the sensitive needle 

is condemned to the groove. 

 

I can't remember taking that out. It fits thematically with the LP, Rosemary Tonks living in Paris when Miles Davis was very much a thing, the metaphor of being stuck in a groove and it has her trademark exclamation mark. I can't think why I would have taken it out but equally can't see how I could have done so by accident. It is intact in the version published in the anthology it was contributed to and so, for the benefit of future professors wondering about the revisions in the collected version, no, I'm sorry, I can't explain.

What's done is done. Perhaps, if I did it deliberately, I had my reasons at the time but the layout of the pages in the book would accommodate the out-take perfectly well. I stare at the lines and think I like them well enough. I try to think why I might have removed them and can't.

For the time being it's harmlessly mystifying but it contains sinister implications of what is to come. When she was younger than I am now, Elizabeth Bishop found the milk on her desk which meant her glasses must be in the fridge.