excerpts

rom "Range of Motion" by Elizabeth Berg.

"Summons" Robert Francis
Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
Come wake me up. Come any hour
Of night. Come whistling up the road.
Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door.
Make me get out of bed and come
And let you in and light a light.
Tell me the northern lights are on
And make me look. Or tell me clouds
Are doing something to the moon
They never did before, and show me.
See that I see. Talk to me till
I'm half as wide awake as you
And start to dress wondering why
I ever went to bed at all.
Tell me the walking is superb.
Not only tell me but persuade me.
You know I'm not too hard persuaded.

"I think that the world desires to be beautiful. I have found that beauty in mathematics. I have found it in the hunting behavior of wolves, and the way men and women touch each other. I think the world's keenest desire is for beauty, and that our knowledge of how to achieve that is the various forms of behavior and expression that we apply a single word to, which is love." ~Barry Lopez


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...I stretch out on the bed, put my head on the pillow beside her, give her fragrant cheek a kiss. What is that smell children carry? Soap, mixed with clean kid sweat. Life....

....And I said no, no, it's not that; it's that I love you so much and I just want to be in there. And he said yes, he understood that, but he didn't think it was possible. He asked me if I knew what the word asymptote meant. I said no. He said it was a mathematical term and I asked him if he were crazy asking me if I knew about that when he knew I got panicked if the person at the cash register said, "You want to give me a nickel so I can give you back a dollar?" He said no, this was a kind of higher mathematics that he thought I could understand, because it emulated the nature of human beings. That you culd see longing in mathematics, and elegance, and grace. And then he showed me the configuration of an asymptote, the tangents and the curved lines, and the way that they came very, very close to touching, but never quite did. That you could follow them out to infinity and they would be so close, but they would never touch. I said yes, that's right, that is a human longing and it's not fair that we have it if we can't have it fulfilled. And he said that it wasn't unfair. That we lived with knowledge of a promise that later, later, all things would be returned to us. How much later, I asked, and he said, Oh, way later. But in the meantime, we had such fine compensation....

.....I am living on a planet where the silk dresses of Renaissance women rustled, where people died in plagues, where Mozart sat to play, where sap runs in the spring, where children are caught in the crossfire, where gold glints from rock, where religion shines its light only to lose its way, where people stop to reach a hand to help each other to cross, where much is known about the life of the ant, where the gift of getting my husband back was as accidental as my almost losing him, where the star called sun shows itself differently at every hour, where people get so bruised and confused they kill each other, where baobabs grow into impossible shapes with trunks that tell stories to hands, where rivers wind wide and green with terrible currents, where you rise in the morning and feel your own arms with your own hands, checking yourself, where lovers' hearts sweel with the certain knowledge that only they are the ones, where viruses are seen under the insistent eye of the microscope and the birth of stars is witnessed through the lens of the telescope, where catepillars crawl and skyscrapers are erected because of the blue line on the blueprint--I am living here on this planet, it is my time to have my legs walk the earth, and I am turning around to tell Jay once again, "Yes, here." I am saying that all of this, all of this, all of these things are the telling songs of the wider life, and I am listening with gratitude, and I am listening for as long as I can, and I am listening with all of my might.


current mood: pensive
current music: dave rowe