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"Who knows how to make love stay?
"Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay.
"Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.
"Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning."
--Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
"Altruism"
What if we got outside ourselves and there
really was an outside out there, not just
our insides turned inside out? What if there
really were a you beyond me, not just
the waves off my own fire, like those waves off
the backyard grill you can see the next yard through,
though not well--just enough to know that off
to the right belongs to someone else, not you.
What if, when we said I love you, there were
a you to love as there is a yard beyond
to walk past the grill and get to? To endure
the endless walk through the self, knowing through a bond
that has no basis (for ourselves are all we know)
is altruism: not giving, but coming to know
someone is there through the wavy vision
of the self's heat, love become a decision.
--Molly Peacock
"Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music."
--Sergei Rachmaninoff
"I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing"
I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it stood there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wondered how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it,
and twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana
solitary in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend or lover near,
I know very well I could not.
--Walt Whitman
"Saigo"
Times have changed; seppuku has not.
(I wouldn't know, I wasn't there
for the final battle. Then: it's all historiographical
from thereon out. People died and rebellions, too;
that force met this force when the sun was here
on that date, a collection of fortune and facts, but
somewhere between blood, the blade, the push,
the man who swore to acquit himself of politics,
the failure, the right time, the wrong time,
the oversights, the geographical separations,
the lingering sentiments of status,
the two prior rebellions, the last rebellion--
the man who swore to acquit himself of politics,
somewhere between blood, the blade, the push;
I imagine, kneeling in the grass, a little cranky,
a little sad, too, kneeling nostalgically in the grass,
and then the blood, the blade, the push,
a rush of blood to the ears--I wouldn't know;
personally, even generally--but the faint hum,
looking upward, where the sky is, swearing
to acquit himself at last of politics. It can't be helped.)
One can't sleep on a powder keg indefinitely.
(Eventually, arteries, dreams, revolutionaries
come down to the manipulations of the moment;
arteries, dreams, revolutionaries, powder kegs,
all things burst.)
--Jaida Jones
"Flowers"
Right now I am the flower girl.
I bring fresh flowers,
dump out the old ones, the greenish water
that smells like dirty teeth
into the bathroom sink, snip off the stem ends
with surgical scissors I borrowed
from the nursing station,
put them into a jar
I brought from home, because they don't have vases
in this hotel for the ill,
place them on the table beside my father
where he can't see them
because he won't open his eyes.
He lies flattened under the white sheet.
He says he is on a ship,
and I can see it--
the functional white walls, the minimal windows,
the little bells, the rubbery footsteps of strangers,
the whispering all around
of the air-conditioner, or else the ocean,
and he is on a ship;
he's giving us up, giving up everything
but the breath going in
and out of his diminished body;
minute by minute he's sailing slowly away,
away from us and our waving hands
that do not wave.
The women come in, two of them, in blue;
it's no use being kind, in here,
if you don't have hands like theirs--
large and capable, the hands
of plump muscular angels,
the ones that blow trumpets and lift swords.
They shift him carefully, tuck in the corners.
It hurts, but as little as possible.
Pain is their lore. The rest of us
are helpless amateurs.
A suffering you can neither cure nor enter--
there are worse things, but not many.
After a while it makes us impatient.
Can't we do anything but feel sorry?
I sit there, watching the flowers
in their pickle jar. He is asleep, or not.
I think: He looks like a turtle.
Or: He looks erased.
But somewhere in there, at the far end of the tunnel
of pain and forgetting he's trapped in
is the same father I knew before,
the one who carried the green canoe
over the portage, the painter trailing,
myself with the fishing rods, slipping
on the wet boulders and slapping flies.
That was the last time we went there.
There will be a last time for this also,
bringing cut flowers to this white room.
Sooner or later I too
will have to give everything up,
even the sorrow that comes with these flowers,
even the anger,
even the memory of how I brought them
from a garden I will no longer have by then,
and put them beside my dying father,
hoping I could still save him.
--Margaret Atwood
"Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay.
"Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.
"Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning."
--Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
"Altruism"
What if we got outside ourselves and there
really was an outside out there, not just
our insides turned inside out? What if there
really were a you beyond me, not just
the waves off my own fire, like those waves off
the backyard grill you can see the next yard through,
though not well--just enough to know that off
to the right belongs to someone else, not you.
What if, when we said I love you, there were
a you to love as there is a yard beyond
to walk past the grill and get to? To endure
the endless walk through the self, knowing through a bond
that has no basis (for ourselves are all we know)
is altruism: not giving, but coming to know
someone is there through the wavy vision
of the self's heat, love become a decision.
--Molly Peacock
"Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music."
--Sergei Rachmaninoff
"I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing"
I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it stood there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wondered how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it,
and twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana
solitary in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend or lover near,
I know very well I could not.
--Walt Whitman
"Saigo"
Times have changed; seppuku has not.
(I wouldn't know, I wasn't there
for the final battle. Then: it's all historiographical
from thereon out. People died and rebellions, too;
that force met this force when the sun was here
on that date, a collection of fortune and facts, but
somewhere between blood, the blade, the push,
the man who swore to acquit himself of politics,
the failure, the right time, the wrong time,
the oversights, the geographical separations,
the lingering sentiments of status,
the two prior rebellions, the last rebellion--
the man who swore to acquit himself of politics,
somewhere between blood, the blade, the push;
I imagine, kneeling in the grass, a little cranky,
a little sad, too, kneeling nostalgically in the grass,
and then the blood, the blade, the push,
a rush of blood to the ears--I wouldn't know;
personally, even generally--but the faint hum,
looking upward, where the sky is, swearing
to acquit himself at last of politics. It can't be helped.)
One can't sleep on a powder keg indefinitely.
(Eventually, arteries, dreams, revolutionaries
come down to the manipulations of the moment;
arteries, dreams, revolutionaries, powder kegs,
all things burst.)
--Jaida Jones
"Flowers"
Right now I am the flower girl.
I bring fresh flowers,
dump out the old ones, the greenish water
that smells like dirty teeth
into the bathroom sink, snip off the stem ends
with surgical scissors I borrowed
from the nursing station,
put them into a jar
I brought from home, because they don't have vases
in this hotel for the ill,
place them on the table beside my father
where he can't see them
because he won't open his eyes.
He lies flattened under the white sheet.
He says he is on a ship,
and I can see it--
the functional white walls, the minimal windows,
the little bells, the rubbery footsteps of strangers,
the whispering all around
of the air-conditioner, or else the ocean,
and he is on a ship;
he's giving us up, giving up everything
but the breath going in
and out of his diminished body;
minute by minute he's sailing slowly away,
away from us and our waving hands
that do not wave.
The women come in, two of them, in blue;
it's no use being kind, in here,
if you don't have hands like theirs--
large and capable, the hands
of plump muscular angels,
the ones that blow trumpets and lift swords.
They shift him carefully, tuck in the corners.
It hurts, but as little as possible.
Pain is their lore. The rest of us
are helpless amateurs.
A suffering you can neither cure nor enter--
there are worse things, but not many.
After a while it makes us impatient.
Can't we do anything but feel sorry?
I sit there, watching the flowers
in their pickle jar. He is asleep, or not.
I think: He looks like a turtle.
Or: He looks erased.
But somewhere in there, at the far end of the tunnel
of pain and forgetting he's trapped in
is the same father I knew before,
the one who carried the green canoe
over the portage, the painter trailing,
myself with the fishing rods, slipping
on the wet boulders and slapping flies.
That was the last time we went there.
There will be a last time for this also,
bringing cut flowers to this white room.
Sooner or later I too
will have to give everything up,
even the sorrow that comes with these flowers,
even the anger,
even the memory of how I brought them
from a garden I will no longer have by then,
and put them beside my dying father,
hoping I could still save him.
--Margaret Atwood