How I Might Sound if I Left Myself Alone

Turning to watch you leave,
I see we must always walk toward

other loves, river of heaven 
between two office buildings.

Orphaned cloud, fish soup poppling,
book spined in the open palm. Unstoppable light.

I think it is all right.
Or do tonight, garden toad

a speaking stone,
young sound in an old heart. 

Annul the self? I float it,
a day lily in my wine. Oblivion?

I love our lives,
keeping me from it. 


- Lisa Russ Spaar

From "Tender is the Night" (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

After that they got in their car and started back toward Amiens. A thin warm rain was falling on the new scrubby woods and underbrush and they passed great funeral pyres of sorted duds, shells, bombs, grenades, and equipment, helmets, bayonets, gun stocks and rotten leather, abandoned six years in the ground. And suddenly around a bend the white caps of a great sea of graves. Dick asked the chauffeur to stop.

“There’s that girl—and she still has her wreath.”

They watched as he got out and went over to the girl, who stood uncertainly by the gate with a wreath in her hand. Her taxi waited. She was a red-haired girl from Tennessee whom they had met on the train this morning, come from Knoxville to lay a memorial on her brother’s grave. There were tears of vexation on her face.

“The War Department must have given me the wrong number,” she whimpered. “It had another name on it. I been lookin’ for it since two o’clock, and there’s so many graves.”

“Then if I were you I’d just lay it on any grave without looking at the name,” Dick advised her.

“You reckon that’s what I ought to do?”

“I think that’s what he’d have wanted you to do.”

It was growing dark and the rain was coming down harder.

She left the wreath on the first grave inside the gate, and accepted Dick’s suggestion that she dismiss her taxi-cab and ride back to Amiens with them.

Rosemary shed tears again when she heard of the mishap—altogether it had been a watery day, but she felt that she had learned something, though exactly what it was she did not know. Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy—one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

From Book 11 of the Odyssey, “The Dead”

“My mother answered, ‘She stays firm. Her heart

is strong. She is still in your house. And all

her nights are passed in misery, and days

in tears. But no one has usurped your throne.

Telemachus still tends the whole estate

unharmed and feasts in style, as lords should do,

and he is always asked to council meetings.

Your father stays out in the countryside.

He will not come to town. He does not sleep

on a real bed with blankets and fresh sheets.

In winter he sleeps inside, by the fire,

just lying in the ashes with the slaves;

his clothes are rags. In summer and at harvest,

the piles of fallen leaves are beds for him.

He lies there grieving, full of sorrow, longing

for your return. His old age is not easy.

And that is why I met my fate and died.

The goddess did not shoot me in my home,

aiming with gentle arrows. Nor did sickness

suck all the strength out from my limbs, with long

and cruel wasting. No, it was missing you,

Odysseus, my sunshine; your sharp mind,

and your kind heart. That took sweet life from me.’

Then in my heart I wanted to embrace

the spirit of my mother. She was dead,

and I did not know how.”


- from Book 11 of the Odyssey, “The Dead”

Henri Cole - "Corpse Pose"

Waiting for a deceased friend’s cat to die

is almost unbearable. “This is where you live now,”

I explain. “Please stop crying.” But he is like a widower

in some kind of holding pattern around a difficult truth.

His head, his bearing, his movements are handsome to me,

a kind of permanent elsewhere devoted to separation and death.

“Please, let’s try to forget, dear. We need each other.”

I feel I want to tell him something, but I don’t know what.

So much that happens doesn’t make sense. Each night,

I do the corpse pose, and he ponders me, with his corpse face,

while licking his coat. The Egyptians first tamed his kind.

Their dead were buried in galleries closed up with stone slabs.

When my friend and I were young,

we tramped through woods of black oaks.

- Henri Cole

Ellen Burstyn on "The Last Picture Show" (1971)

“One of my favourite moments was the first time we read the script together,” says Burstyn. “We didn’t know each other, we didn’t really have a sense of how good the film was. As we were reading and seeing each other and getting to connect with each other, the story and the characters came alive. When we turned the last page, there was a moment of silence. Everybody just sat there, stunned, realising what we were in for, what we were part of.” Full article here.

T.S. Eliot - "Landscapes"

I. New Hampshire

Children’s voices in the orchard
Between the blossom- and the fruit-time:
Golden head, crimson head,
Between the green tip and the root.
Black wing, brown wing, hover over;
Twenty years and the spring is over;
To-day grieves; to-morrow grieves;
Cover me over, light-in-leaves;
Golden head, black wing,
Cling, swing,
Spring, sing,
Swing up into the apple-tree.

II. Virginia

Red river, red river,
Slow flow heat is silence
No will is still as a river
Still. Will heat move
Only through the mocking-bird
Heard once? Still hills
Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,
White trees, wait, wait,
Delay, decay. Living, living,
Never moving. Ever moving
Iron thoughts came with me
And go with me:
Red river, river, river.

III. Usk

Do not suddenly break the branch, or
Hope to find
The white hart beside the white well.
Glance aside, not for lance, do not spell
Old enchantments. Let them sleep.
’Gently dip, but not too deep’,
Lift your eyes
Where the roads dip and where the roads rise
Seek only there
Where the grey light meets the green air
The hermit’s chapel, the pilgrim’s prayer.



- from The Waste Land and Other Poems

From "Petroglyphs of Serena", by Adrian C. Louis

“The old people were moving slowly

through the cold air like exhausted swimmers

fighting the tides of a lung-raping sea.

But, the sun had its high beams on

and near the creek children were laughing

and moving as fast as spit on a hot woodstove.

Grandfather, it was a good day to pray.

Grandfather, it was a good day to pray

that the young would somehow get to be old….”


full poem at http://poems3.blogspot.com/, from his collection “Ceremonies of the Damned”

Henri Cole - "Solitude: The Tower"

Long ago, I lived at the foot of the mountains,

where my parents lived when they were young.

Nearby, there was a daffodil farm, which I bicycled past

each day on my way to the supermarket.

Occasionally, there were earthquakes, but no one noticed.

At my desk, words and phrases grew only slowly,

like the embedded or basal portion of a hair,

tooth, nail, or nerve. As I looked at the empty page—

seeing into love, seeing into suffering,

seeing into madness—my head ached so,

dear reader, emotions toppling me in one

direction, then another, but writing this now,

sometimes in a rush, sometimes after drifting thought,

I feel happiness, I feel I am not alone.