Obviously, doctor
The Letter
Linda Gregg
I’m not feeling strong yet, but I am taking
good care of myself. The weather is perfect.
I read and walk all day and then walk to the sea.
I expect to swim soon. For now I am content.
I am not sure what I hope for. I feel I am
doing my best. It reminds me of when I was
sixteen dreaming of Lorca, the gentle trees outside
and the creek. Perhaps poetry replaces something
in me that others receive more naturally.
Perhaps my happiness proves a weakness in my life.
Even my failures in poetry please me.
Time is very different here. It is very good
to be away from public ambition.
I sweep and wash, cook and shop.
Sometimes I go into town in the evening
and have pastry with custard. Sometimes I sit
at a table by the harbor and drink half a beer.
Stupid when it came to realities
“I think Miriam was aware of her daughter’s deficiencies. I think her choice of reading – her insisting on Balzac and other French novelists – was done with an object. The French are great realists. I think she wanted Celia to realise life and human nature for what it is, something common, sensual, splendid, sordid, tragic, and intensely comic. She did not succeed, because Celia’s nature matched her appearance – she was Scandinavian in feeling. For her the long Sagas, the heroic tales of voyages and heroes. As she clung to fairy tales in childhood, so she preferred Materlinck and Fiona MacLeod and Yeats when she grew up. She read the other books, but they seemed as unreal to her as fairy stories and fantasies seem annoying to a practical realist.”
An Unfinished Portrait, Mary Westmacott (Agatha Christie)
Hope/Need
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
–Mary Oliver
A Fate Like Totally Worse Than Death
I always mean to watch It’s A Wonderful Life at Christmas, but this was the first year I got a chance. I cried like a sap at the end, but had to laugh at a moment in the dramatic climax. George is seeing what life would be like if he had never been born – his friends and family have ended up dead, destitute, or in insane asylums, and his hometown has gone to wrack and ruin. But the one thing that tips him over the edge, which his guardian angel barely dares to tell him, is the fate of his wife, Mary.
What could prompt such horror? Without George in the world, Mary has become…
… an “old maid” who works in the town library! The horror!
Of course, George comes through and Mary is delivered back to her life of domestic, bookless bliss. PHEW.
Delicate are you, and your vows are delicate, too
No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved.
If I’d lived longer, I would have waited longer.
Knowing you are faithless keeps me alive and hungry.
Knowing you faithful would kill me with joy.
Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, trans. Vijay Seshadri (full text at Make Bright The Sparrows)
A line of poetry written with a splash of blood
“True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”
— Yukio Mishima
A Mighty Kindness
Zero Circle
by: Rumi (translation by Coleman Barks)
Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.
We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we’re lying.
If we say No, we don’t see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.
So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Beside ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.
Image from American Vogue, January 2011
To Seek A Great Perhaps
The End
By Mark Strand
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.
When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky
Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.
Cookies & Cream, even
Watching American Gigolo.
Wearing Coco Chanel-esque silk pajamas.
And red lipstick.
And eating Haagen-Dazs…
Straight out of the tub.
Sometimes it’s nice to just embrace the cliche and take it as far as you can go.
