THE SENTENCE--ANNA AKHMATOVA
Today
I have so much to do
I must kill memory once and for all
I must turn soul to stone
I must learn to live again
Unless...Summer's ardent rustling
Is like a festival outside my window.
For a long time I've foreseen this
Brilliant day, deserted house.
I must kill memory once and for all
I must turn soul to stone
I must learn to live again
Unless...Summer's ardent rustling
Is like a festival outside my window.
For a long time I've foreseen this
Brilliant day, deserted house.
(translated from the Russian by Judith
Hemschemeyer)
Another Parker (Dorothy) says it best, "You might as well live."
I want to know how I went from this:
Broadsided
to this:
Anti-
I want to go back to praising the world.
Here's a gratitude alphabet of what I love and will promote.
1. Art museums Especially the Frist, which was smart enough to obtain a Harvey drawing.
2. Beethoven's Eroica.
3. Coffee. Tea. I'm not me without them. (If you're old enough, you'll get the joke).
4. Diamonds. Rhinestones. Prisms. Shiny shiny shiny.
5. Elegies. Tennyson to O'Hara to Bang to my own.
6. French (Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Char, a wonderful ABC on its own).
7. Geodes. Such beauty, in such an ordinary wrapper.
8. Hairbrushes. Snarl, scratch, slither of hair going through them. I like brushing hair and having mine brushed, too.
9. Indigo buntings. Heck, indigo anything.
10. Jewelry--from Bakelite to bling. (You thought I was going to write John Cusack, didn't you?)
11. Kissing. (See parenthetical 10)
12. Lipstick. Levis. Lazy days. Light filtering through the water maples and falling on the porch.
13. Milky Way bars. I'm monogamously married to them. (And I like those two things as well--monogamy and marriage--as once they defined my life).
14. Nabokov. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
15. Offspring. Mine: Dan and Raleigh.
16. POETRY. Donne. Keats. Tennyson. Whitman. Bishop. Williams. Hayden. Yours. Mine.
17. Questions. More than answers, but why?
18. Rumi. If I could learn to love as he does, my world would be...transformed.
19. Siamese cats. Even/especially one named Koko.
20. Typewriter tins.
21. Umbrellas, paintings with umbrellas.
22. Violets, especially the ones shaded Veronique.
23. Whistler.
24. XOXOXO.
25. You. You. You. You. You. Even you, DZ.
26. Zippers, buttons, hooks and eyes, safety pins. Don't know why, just do. Sewing notions of all kinds. I like closure and also undoing.
XOXO to anyone who's slogged through this list.
5 comments:
So very lovely, Ms. Pamela.
I think I especially love the questions more than the answers one. Once there is an answer, questions are cut short, no?
Thank you. I always ask questions. I never seem to have the right answers. True? All of the above? None of the above? The square of the hypotenuse?
Yep. You say pi r squared and you're done. Where do you go from there?
The Eroica was also Beethoven's favorite.
I love the list.
I collect buttons in my change jar along with the change. Night before last I used a large safety pin to run the silk ribbon back through the eyelet holes in my nightie where it had come loose in the laundry.
I love the list.
xoxo
Dear R and M,
I have a whole poem devoted to miscellanies such as sewing motions, "Shame at the Five and Dime." (I still really love this one, even though most of my poems these days make me kind of ashamed, like the rubber band I had to put around my best Pappagallo flats one day at work when the sole flapped out).
Buttons are one of my favorite things. I resist buying them unless they're Bakelite.
This is the Charles Jensen issue of Poets and Artists, which is a fine read:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/35200370/Poets-and-Artists-February-2010
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