Feeling sad, and mortal

For a friend, because I hope one day he will see me as a friend, too.

I cannot give you solutions to all life’s problems,
Nor do I have answers to your doubts or fears
But I can listen to you and share it with you
I cannot change neither your past nor your future.
But when you need me I’ll be by your side.
I cannot prevent you from stumbling
I can only offer you my hand to hold on to you so you won’t fall.
Your joys, your victories, your successes are not mine.
But I truly enjoy it when I see you happy.
I do not judge the decisions you take in life.
I constrain myself to support you, to stimulate and to help you if you ask me to.
I cannot draw limits for you within which you must act,
But I can offer you the space needed to grow.
I cannot avert your sufferings when some pain is breaking your heart.
But I can cry with you and pick up the pieces to armour it again.
I cannot tell you who you are, nor who you should be.
I can only love you as you are and be your friend.
These days, I have been thinking about my friends, amongst whom you appeared.
You were neither on top, nor at the bottom, nor in the middle.
You were not heading nor concluding the list.
You were not the first number, nor the last.
And neither do I pretend to be the first, the second, or the third on your list.
It’s enough if you want me as a friend.
Thank you for being one.

--Jorge Luis Borges

The art of losing

The art of losing isn't hard to master:
So many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master,
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

"I'll take a whack at it!"

Closure

I never really understood
What they mean by it.
Nothing has been left ajar. A door
Has been closed, and irrevocably.
The veil drawn between us allows

Nothing.

Slowly

(I always feign an indifference to poetry, because the truth is that it was my first love. I wanted to be a modern-day Sylvia Plath without the philandering husband and the oven. I wanted to be Amy Lowell. Dorothy Parker was my idol. I fell asleep at night chanting Matthew Arnold to myself. I fought with anyone who might listen that it's not "e. e. cummings" but, also legitimately, "E. E. Cummings." Too bad I don't have any talent. All I can do is admire poetry like this--honest and sharp--from afar.)


Slowly
Donna Masini

I watched a snake once, swallow a rabbit.
Fourth grade, the reptile zoo
the rabbit stiff, nose in, bits of litter stuck to its fur,

its head clenched in the wide
jaws of the snake, the snake
sucking it down its long throat.

All throat that snake—I couldn't tell
where the throat ended, the body
began. I remember the glass

case, the way that snake
took its time (all the girls, groaning, shrieking
but weren’t we amazed, fascinated,

saying we couldn’t look, but looking, weren’t we
held there, weren’t we
imagining—what were we imaging?)

Mrs. Paterson urged us to move on girls,
but we couldn’t move. It was like
watching a fern unfurl, a minute

hand move across a clock. I didn’t know why
that snake didn’t choke, the rabbit never
moved, how the jaws kept opening

wider, sucking it down, just so
I am taking this in, slowly,
taking it into my body:

this grief. How slow
the body is to realize.
You are never coming back.

Authors' ghosts

I think that authors' ghosts creep back
Nightly to haunt the sleeping shelves
And find the books they wrote.
Those authors put final, semi-final touches,
Sometimes whole paragraphs.

Whole pages are added, rewritten, revised,
So deeply by night those authors employ
Themselves with those old books of theirs.

How otherwise
Explain the fact that maybe after years
Have passed, the reader
Picks up the book - But was it like that?
I don't remember this...Where
Did this ending come from?
I recall quite another.

Oh yes, it has been tampered with
No doubt about it -
The author's very touch is here, there and there,
Where it wasn't before, and
What's more, something's missing -
I could have sworn...

--Muriel Spark
(In: Litt, Toby and Ali Smith [eds]: 13. New Writing. London: Picador and BAC, 2005.)


(When I reread Muriel Sparks' "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" about three years ago, it totally wasn't the same.)

Special glasses

I had to send away for them
because they are not available in any store.

They look the same as any sunglasses
with a light tint and silvery frames,
but instead of filtering out the harmful
rays of the sun,

they filter out the harmful sight of you—
you on the approach,
you waiting at my bus stop,
you, face in the evening window.

Every morning I put them on
and step out the side door
whistling a melody of thanks to my nose
and ears for holding them in place, just so,

singing a song of gratitude
to the lens grinder at his heavy bench
and to the very lenses themselves
because they allow it all to come in, all but you.

How they know the difference
between the green hedges, the stone walls,
and you is beyond me,

yet the schoolbuses flashing in the rain
do come in, as well as the postman waving
and the mother and daughter dogs next door,

and then there is the tea kettle
about to play its chord—
everything sailing right in but you, girl.

Yes, just as the night air passes through the screen,
but not the mosquito,
and as water swirls down the drain,
but not the eggshell,
so the flowering trellis and the moon
pass through my special glasses,
but not you.

Let us keep it this way, I say to myself,
as I lay my special glasses on the night table,
pull the chain on the lamp,
and say a prayer—unlike the song—
that I will not see you in my dreams.

-Billy Collins, The Trouble with Poetry, 40-41.

221B, by Vincent Starrett

This has always been my favorite Sherlock Holmes poem. I just rediscovered it today.

Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game's afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears--
Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.

One good thing about all this brouhaha over the 2009 film is that the love of Sherlockian purists is made only stronger. I haven't reread the stories in years and now I think I will. I can remember when I used to print out Sherlock Holmes illustrations and poems and frame them, or paste them on notebook covers and folders. None of my classmates ever understood or felt the same but I did have the comfort of the Internet; I knew that somewhere, somehow, the Diogenes Club was sitting down to breakfast to commemorate Professor Moriarty, or having a tribute to roses (the one flower Holmes singled out and praised).

Here's to you, Holmes. My life is crazy and everything in it seems to be changing for the worse, until I don't know what to hold on to, but part of me always feels secure--because it's always 1895.