The missing All -- prevented Me
From missing minor Things.
If nothing larger than a World's
Departure from a Hinge --
Or Sun's extinction be observed --
'Twas not so large that I
Could lift my forehead from my work
For Curiosity.
Emily Dickinson
When You Disguised Yourself as Munch’s Madonna
I dreamed you were dreaming of me.
Have I truly been myself on any other night?
If you dream of me
I don’t shatter like glass --
if you dream of me
I don’t have to break
like a mirror thrown against a stone wall.
I am deep if you look into me
in the shiny mirror you carry
behind your shadowy breasts --
I am a clean cold spring in the forest
where deer and foxes drink
and birdsong drifts like mist
and the images of birds skim the sky,
if you trail your dreaming fingers through me.
The Erotic
I am a lock.
Your name is
a silver key
that I carry
folded in my
breath (exactly
as a child--
devoted and
shy and
already hearing
the first music
that will open him--
carries a coin
to church
in a bright
silk handkerchief).
[ .... ]
one stone on another stone
a little click when you tap them together
stillness
there is nothing else
longing shivers in the blood
“….people who appear like metaphors somewhere further out than we do, beckoned, not driven, invented by belief, author and hero of a real dream by which our own courage and cunning are tested and tried, so that we may wonder all over again what is veritable and inevitable and possible and what it is to become whoever we may be."
- Diane Arbus, "The Full Circle"
Of course, Diane Arbus -- whom I can’t help being a little in love with, these past few weeks -- is talking about her circus freaks and crazy street preachers and tattooed strippers. But what I have to offer is this, ordinary people in the midst of their ordinary lives. It is all I have today against the inevitability of death, the wild despair and dread in the voice of one who means so much to me.
