strike that

I don’t know how it works with good friends, the way you sometimes know to call them right when they are eating gnocchi three thousand miles away and telling a story about you (and the place you used to go together for gnocchi), the way they text message out of the blue I sure enjoyed your blog today right when you’ve decided to retire from self-absorbed ranting, the way you know from their email subject, News, what the news is. The way they send just the right poem, on just the right day, even though they’ve never sent you a poem before, even though they heard it on the radio two weeks ago. They didn’t send it then; they sent it now, when you most needed to read it.

Failing and Flying

by Jack Gilbert, from Refusing Heaven

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of triumph.

And I haven’t fallen out of a marriage or even out of love or anything near so dramatic just now, but this is exactly the poem I needed, gray Sunday morning of a stalling spring, feeling newly and pleasantly uncertain. Yesterday I stood over the turbines at Bonneville Dam and despite interpretive materials and the patient explanations of my friend with a physics degree I really couldn’t get it, couldn’t get how moving water lights my lights, and that my friends is a puzzle but this, this poem in my inbox, this morning, is a sweet and marvelous mystery.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:50 AM