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April 08, 2004 7:35 AM- julia alvarez - OH!
Last night, I took The Woman I Kept To Myself to bed. Wow. It has been so, so long since a volume of poetry lifted me up and swept me away! So long. I think the last time it happened in this kind of overwhelming rush of soul to soul communication was with We Are The Young Magicians by Ruth Forman. How the good graces got this book to fall into my hands I will never know, but I am so acutely awake now that it has. Our wedding anniversary is in June and I know exactly what I am giving the man: a calligraphy of this poem with a watercolor wash over it. MY BOTTOM LINE You are the bottom line, my love, the net that catches me each time I take a leap toward an absolute that isn't there but appears dispersed in the relative: warm supper waiting when I get in late, my folded long johns on the laundry stack, the covers on my side turned sweetly down when I finally head upstairs from work that couldn't wait till morning, the love note tucked in my suitcase for my night away. It says the obvious, the old cliches I wouldn't want my friends to know we use for love. And god forbid my enemies should get hold of these endearments, so banal, I would lose my readers' trust if someone published them under my name. But still as I write mine (with smiley face) and slip it under the pillow on your side, or when I read yours in a hotel room I feel more moved than by a Rilke poem or a Tolstoy novel or a Shakespeare play. My love grows stronger with the tried and true if it comes from you. More and more as we age and the golden boys peer out of the magazines with their sultry looks and their arched brows, I'm so relieved I'm not an ingenue searching for you at parties, singles bars. I have you, waving when my plane gets in, curling your body in the shape of mine, my love, my number one, my bottom line. Julia Alvarez, The Woman I Kept To Myself
got 2 cents?
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heidemarie says: Ooohh, I'm buying myself this wonderful book tonight! posted on: January 30
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