If you come here often, you know me pretty well now, after a fashion. Certainly you know many of my passions. After all, this has largely become the place for my passion: this cool white imagined room in my head, where I keep the things I treasure: bits of conversations; snatches of music floating by; the impressionist fiction arising unbidden from a particular scent; a really important memory. You know, if you come here, that I love, in no particular order: road trips, rain, perfume, music, books. BUt there are others I don't talk about often or at all: boxes of nail polishes that shimmer in a multitude of hues; the ways leaves change color in fall so that I take hundreds of pictures that are never as good as the ones in my mind; the ocean, always and often foremost, the ocean.
Here's another: poetry. I love poetry. I have so many books of poetry, so many favorite poems I've read again and again. I particularly like modern American poetry. I have a few books of modern poetry, mostly anthologies, that I've purchased several times, when I couldn't find the original copy or was worried the original was out of print and I wouldn't even find another. And because I like you, dear reader, and because I only very recently moved into a place where I could open ten years of boxes and look at all my books and I'm excited to have ready access to all those books at once, I have a little gift for you. I'm going to begin sharing a few of my favorites with you, along with some random things I string together with them...songs and memories and...things, just things. Things that create the full experience of the poem for me.
I hope you like it.
. . . . .
Privilege of Being by Robert Hass
Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal
of human longing
are braiding one another’s hair, which is
strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy—
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed—
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man’s shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly
in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They
shudder pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster
skin hawking rags
in the lewd alleys of the novel.
All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound
the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold
each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death
for an hour or so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman
says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning
because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions. He runs beside
her, he thinks
of the sadness they have gasped and crooned
their way out of
coming, clutching each other with old, invented
forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
companionable like the couples
on the summer beach
reading magazine articles about intimacy
between the sexes
to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.
from Human Wishes, 1989
_____
From left to right, top to bottom: By Kilian A Taste of Heaven; Weeping Angel, Spring Grove Cemetery & Arboretum; Golden Eagle Feathers; Atelier Cologne Grand Neroli; Grey Goose Feathers; Holding Hands; Oregon Coast; Ineke Floral Curiosities Perfume Angels Trumpet; Steller's Sea Eagle Head Feathers.
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