Meaningful Love

What the bad news was

became apparent too late

for us to do anything good about it.

I was offered no urgent dreaming,

didn't need a name or anything.

Everything was taken care of.

In the medium-size city of my awareness

voles are building colossi.

The blue room is over there.

He put out no feelers.

The day was all as one to him.

Some days he never leaves his room

and those are the best days,

by far.

There were morose gardens farther down the slope,

anthills that looked like they belonged there.

The sausages were undercooked,

the wine too cold, the bread molten.

Who said to bring sweaters?

The climate's not that dependable.

The Atlantic crawled slowly to the left

pinning a message on the unbound golden hair of sleeping maidens,

a ruse for next time,

where fire and water are rampant in the streets,

the gate closed—no visitors today

or any evident heartbeat.

I got rid of the book of fairy tales,

pawned my old car, bought a ticket to the funhouse,

found myself back here at six o'clock,

pondering "possible side effects."

There was no harm in loving then,

no certain good either. But love was loving servants

or bosses. No straight road issuing from it.

Leaves around the door are penciled losses.

Twenty years to fix it.

Asters bloom one way or another.


~ John Ashberry

The Sun Also Rises

"No matter how vulgar a hotel is, the" bar is always nice."

"It's odd."

"Bartenders have always been fine."

"You know," Brett said, "it's quite true. He is only nineteen.
Isn't it amazing?"

We touched the two glasses as they stood side by side on the
bar. They were coldly beaded. Outside the curtained window was
the summer heat of Madrid.

"I like an olive in a Martini," I said to the barman.

"Right you are, sir. There you are."

"Thanks."

"I should have asked, you know."

The barman went far enough up the bar so that he would not
hear our conversation. Brett had sipped from the Martini as it
stood, on the wood. Then she picked it up. Her hand was steady
enough to lift it after that first sip.

"It's good. Isn't it a nice bar?"

"They're all nice bars."

"You know I didn't believe it at first. He was born in 1905.
I was in school in Paris, then. Think of that."

"Anything you want me to think about it?"

"Don't be an ass. Would you buy a lady a drink?"

"We'll have two more Martinis."

"As they were before, sir?"

"They were very good," Brett smiled at him.


~ Ernest Hemingway

The Anactoria Poem

Some there are who say that the fairest thing seen

on the black earth is an array of horsemen;

some, men marching; some would say ships; but I say

         she whom one loves best



is the loveliest. Light were the work to make this

plain to all, since she, who surpassed in beauty

all mortality, Helen, once forsaking

         her lordly husband,



fled away to Troy--land across the water.

Not the thought of child nor beloved parents

was remembered, after the Queen of Cyprus

         won her at first sight.



Since young brides have hearts that can be persuaded

easily, light things, palpitant to passion

as am I, remembering Anaktória

         who has gone from me



and whose lovely walk and the shining pallor

of her face I would rather see before my

eyes than Lydia's chariots in all their glory

         armored for battle.


Edited by Richard Lattimore

~ Sappho

Be Drunk

Translated by Louis Simpson

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

~ Charles Baudelaire

A Rose For Emily

The man himself lay in the bed.

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.

~ William Faulkner

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback, without a head. It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War, and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind. His haunts are not confined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacent roads, and especially to the vicinity of a church at no great distance. Indeed, certain of the most authentic historians of those parts, who have been careful in collecting and collating the floating facts concerning this spectre, allege that the body of the trooper having been buried in the churchyard, the ghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head, and that the rushing speed with which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to get back to the churchyard before daybreak.

~ Washington Irving

Chance

may favor obscure brainy aptitudes in you
and a love of the past so blind you would
venture, always securing permission,
into the back library stacks, without food
or water because you have a mission:
to find yourself, in the regulated light,
holding a volume in your hands as you
yourself might like to be held.  Mostly your life
will be voices and images.  Information.  You
may go a long way alone, and travel much
to open a book to renew your touch.

~ Molly Peacock