Men. No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy.
I could hear the icy winds of Sweden, but he didn't seem to feel the chill.
I don't have to follow you. I can read your mind. I know every move you make. I now
your future, Barry, and it doesn't look good.
At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and
scratched paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to
destroy something you could never have.
She tried to worry that something terrible had happened to him, but didn't believe it for
a moment. Nothing terrible ever happened to him, though she was beginning to think that it was
time it damn well did. If nothing terrible happened to him soon maybe she'd do it herself. Now
there was an idea.
As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart. You don't know how lucky you are not
to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.
May you live a thousand years, and I, one day less, so that I might never know the world
without the pleasure of your company.
Where I'm going you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of. Ilsa,
I'm no good at being noble but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little
people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that. Now,
now. . . here's looking at you kid.
And opening my eyes, I am afraid of course to look - this inward look that society scorns
- Still, I search in these woods and find nothing worse than myself, caught between the grapes
and the thorns.
Grown baby short as you looked up past at my face swinging over the human bed, and where
you cried, let me go, let me go.
My sisters will never know that I fall out of myself.
Let the others moan in secret; let each lost butterfly go home.
Unitl tonight, they were separate specialties, different stories, the best of their own worst.
Someday, I promised her, I'll be someone going somewhere. Maybe, Rose, there is another
story, better unsaid.
There is only her miniature photograph left, too long ago now for fear to remember. Special
tonight because I made her into a story that I grew to know and savor.
A reason to worry, Rose, when you fix on an old death like that, and outliving the impact, to
find you've pretended. I am almost someone going home.
I have tried to exorcise the memory of each event and remain still, a mixed child, heavy
with cloths of you.
And me, wondering when the ground would break, and me, wondering how anything fragile survives.
Sleeping in fever, I am unfit to know just who you are.
I guess I'll get along. I always did.
I sit at my desk each night with nowhere to go.
I'm in a room of my own. I think too much. I come to this land to conjure up my daily
bread, to endure, somehow to endure.
I did not see the speechless clouds, I saw only the little white dish of my faith,
breaking in the crater. I kept saying: I've got to have something to hold on to.
Perhaps the moon is a frozen tear, I do not know. Perhaps God is only a deep voice heard
by the deaf, I do not know. Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from
it. I would fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.
They are drunk on the drunkard's dream. Like them, we can only hang on. But they would
pierce our heart, if they could only fly the distance.
Let Christopher and Anne come forth with a carp who is two-thirds too large to fit anywhere
happy.
All we need is someone to let us in.
Let the indifferent sky look on.
The day of fire is coming, the thrush will fly ablaze like a little sky rocket, the beetle
will sink a giant bulldozer, and, at the breaking of the morning, the houses will turn into oil
and will, in their tides of fire, be a becoming and an ending, a red fan. What then, man in your
easy chair, of the anointment of the sick, of the New Jerusalem? You will have to polish up the
stars with Bab-o and find a new God, as the earth empties out into the gnarled hands of the old
redeemer.
I will do nothing extraordinary. I will not divide in two. I will not pick out my white
eyes. Go now, this is a private matter and private affair, and God knows none of your business.
But that is over. The era closes, and large children hang their stockings and build a
black memorial to you. And you, you fade out of sight, like a lost signalman wagging his latern
for the strain that comes no more.
You danced with me, never saying a word. Instead, the serpent spoke as you held me close.
The serpent, that mocker, woke up and pressed against me like great god, and we bent together
like two lonely swans.
I see the child in me writing, "Oh." "Oh," my dear, not "why?"
Lady, bring me your wooden leg so I may stand on my own.
Take a girl, sitting in a chair, like a china doll. She doesn't say a word. She doesn't
even twitch. She's as still as furniture. And you'll move off.
Take a man who is crying over and over, his face like a sponge. And you'll move off.
Take a boy on a bridge. One hundred feet up. About to jump, thinking: This is my last ball
game. This time it's a home run. Wanting the good crack of the bat. Wanting to throw his body
away like a corncob. And you'll move off.
If you must inquire, do so. After all, I am not artificial.
She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like
a monument, step after step. She is solid. As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.
The butterfly owns her now. It covers her and her wounds. She is not terrified of
begonias or telegrams, but surely, this nightgown girl, this awesome flyer, has not seen how the
moon floats through her and in between.
Later, I measured my size against movie stars. I didn't measure up. Someting between my
shoulders was there. But never enough.
If I'm on fire, they dance around it and cook marshmallows. And if I'm ice, they simply
skate on me in little ballet costumes.
Better somehow, to drop myself quickly into an old room. Better (someone said), not to be
born, and far better not to be born twice.
I will fall, bound for nowhere and everywhere.
It's a strange place, this odd home, where your face sits in my hand, so full of distance.
Watch out for friends, because when you betray them, as you will, they will bury their
heads in the toilet and flush themselves away.
Watch out for the intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing, and leaves you hanging
upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.
Here in the hospital, I say, I am not here for the doctors to read like a recipe. No. I
am a daisy girl, blowing in the wind like a piece of sun.
