I mereged one evening from the U-3 Station at Westbanhof into the chill of an Austrian evening feeling lost, anxious, out of breathe and a bit like i imagine one might feel on sucking in the first breathe after a coma, as if I had just stepped off, not an ordinary underground but something with the full nightmarish portent of Alice Notley's The descent of Allette. But the feeling was not one of elation on having emerged out of, but rather a feeling of dispair which seized me, the feeling that i had merely stepped from one place to another without rectifying the terror of something I still, even now can not fully comprehend. I recall wandering the streets aimlessly for some time, crossing a large square just north of the Wetbanhof train station where I was due to depart early the next morning and up Maria Strubes, but without a conscious decicion to do so, I was merely propelled by a habit of one foot proceeding the other. I had been in Vienna for a few days, but immediately on my arrival, owing to piece of bad news from home, I had been throw into a kind of stupor from which I did not emerge for the length of my stay. There were moments when the feeling subsided in the face of a painting at the kunderhistries museum or in the case of this particular day I recal a certain clarity of mind as I wandered about Frued's former residence, now a museum of sorts, which no doubt would have made the good doctor smile. But as I wandered north that evening I moved a bit like a zombie and frequently found myself staring in the window displays of stores I normally would have passed without another thought simply to occupy my mind with stimulous. But I can recall littel of what I saw with only any clarity. I must have wandered thus for the better part of an hour only dimlly aware that it was bitter cold and windy. I remember when the cold sank in, I had stopped in fron of an electronics store, captivated by the animated reporting of what I took to be a weather man, standing beside a road in what looked to be mountains, an embankment behind him already dusted with snow. The man was speaking rapidly with an expression of surprise on his face. he kept his rather thick, bushy and slightly greyed eyebrows raised for the majority of the broadcast as if he could not believe that he was standing in a snow storm on the first day of June. He wore a light coat, the sort of coat that only reporters seem to wear with a plethora of pockets on the breast and more over the stomach with flaps snapped down, as well as the more traditional side paockets. I remember wondering what it was that reporters keep in these pockets. I could not hear a word he said through the thick windows of the store, nor would I have understood anything even if I could have heard. behind him was a small embankment partially covered already with snow interupted here and there by clumps of darkness which I could not clearly make out, but appeared to be bushes, already highlighted by a dusting of snow. The report ended without any text to day where the snow was falling, but as I turned away from the window I suddenly noticed the bite of the wind and wondered from where this unexpected cold had come


. I recall at one point stopping fron of the window dispay for a prefab kitchen company.