evergreen

January 17, 2023Leave a comment

[The Artist] Took This Portrait of Herself By Means of an Ingeniously Devised Mechanism.

—original caption below an image of photographer Margaret Watkins

***

Restored over the past four years, Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin in the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari can only be described as light made manifest. Painted in 1515–1518, it is Venice’s largest altarpiece, spanning twenty-one cedar planks. Oscar Wilde called it “certainly the best picture in Italy,” even as others balked at its dramatic scale. In perfect harmony with the surrounding architecture, one can see the panel silhouetted even from the first step inside the church. It proceeds to grow and grow until the viewer is dwarfed before Titian’s ascending Mary, hovering in the clouds with arms upstretched, heavenward. Angels jostle at her side, putti, as the disciples marvel below, speechless. Sunshine streams through adjacent windows, creating the goldest gold I have ever seen. Supersaturated, dazzling, it evades documentation.

***

Emily Dickinson writes of the “noiseless noise of the Orchard”—the perfection of utter paradox.

“Then there’s a noiseless noise in the Orchard – that I let persons hear – You told me in one letter, you could not come to see me, ‘now,’ and I made no answer, not because I had none, but did not think myself the price that you should come so far”

***

Travel Journal, October 9, 2022, St Giles Cathedral: “Absence makes no sound for it is every sound… Unfathomable loss cannot help but be fathomed—even the acknowledgement of the lack of measure is a measure. A stream bursts because it has no other language.”

***

The center of the painting is shaded red in anticipation. Wings fade. The sun is fractured light. In front of Chagall’s Fall of Icarus (1975), I wondered aloud which is the greater tragedy: to fall with the townspeople watching—to be mourned, to die within a community that can grieve but ultimately do nothing—or to perish utterly alone, falling into the sea on failing wings. You do not speak. When I step backwards to gain a better view, tripping over your shoe, you catch me.

***

“In the shadow / of an unattainable heaven, / burdened by a memory / of perfect orchards trimmed by unseen hands. / Maybe being winged means being wounded / by infinity, blessed by the ordeal of freedom.” —Li-Young Lee, “Tethered”

***

Walking home, an egg carton rests in the crook of my arm. There was an absence once, once and for a long while. I didn’t crave the taste of eggs again until after sitting on that apartment floor, feasting. We played music all evening after months spent miles apart. Another dear friend, another apartment: eggs served scrambled. Quietude of shared sleep. I felt like a child then, tucked in together with a tenderness that asks nothing, this web of trust we bind and build. There was rain and then no rain. Blackberries, almond butter, elderflower. I pray for safe passage; I carry what I can.

***

“Late in my life / in the numb elegance of this city, / I made a decision— / or the decision / shining in the soft, brutal darkness / took hold of me— / to live. / Often I am peaceful / I never imagined that.” —Joan Larkin

***

The girl from the bookshop assessed me briefly, furrowing her brow, “So, are you one of those poets who hates everything, or are you a romance poet?” The chasm of an impossible binary.

Travel Journal, July 31, 2022, Nice Cathedral: “There are many paths but only one reality. I need to get over my own inadequacy. I need to get out of my own way and stop fretting. All I can speak are the words given, all I can do is act with the greatest love. If I am thought a fool, then I am thought a fool. It doesn’t mean I am one for a moment.”

***

In Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Franny, on the verge of an existential crisis, writes in a letter, “I think I’m beginning to look down on all poets except Sappho. I’ve been reading her like mad, and no vulgar remarks, please… ‘Delicate Adonis is dying, Cytherea, what shall we do? Beat your breasts, maidens, and rend your tunics.’ Isn’t that marvellous? She keeps doing that, too” (5).

If Sappho were not left behind in fragments, would she be loved more or less?

“Leave Crete and sweep to this blest temple / Where apple-orchard’s elegance / Is yours, and smouldering altars, ample / Frankincense”

“as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch / high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot – / no, not forgot: were unable to reach”

***

December’s snow departed. It deliquesced, vanishing with the alacrity of a dream.

It winked. It conspired, with and against me. It transported.

***

Sitting in the cold kitchen, I am eating cranberries. The bag kindly suggests, “Stir into yoghurt or sprinkle over cereal,” but I do neither. Outside the window, a crow perches in a tree autumn-bare like an exoskeleton. The bird tilts its head, observing me closely through the portal of the window. We quietly take turns eating small red berries—first them, then me. Commensality. A word remembered from college. The act of eating together, a form of communion.

***

I sink into the field, watching the sky turn opaque lavender. There is only a sliver of moon aglow, more beautiful for being spare. Dappled snow hides cradled in treeshadow. The inevitable voice: “You can tread this ground over and over, but the landscape has changed.”

***

“The anchorite wanted most to know what the bear felt like upon first awakening from his hibernation. When Mary asked him to elaborate, he replied, ‘That is precisely the question I have in mind: is it an elaborate moment for the bear, or is it essentially spare?’” —Mary Ruefle

***

I think of Anna Akhmatova every winter: “I taught myself to live simply and wisely, / to look at the sky and pray to God, / and to wander long before evening / to tire my useless sorrows.” During her lifetime, she was labelled “half-nun, half-harlot” by those who wanted her dead. Her images rebel with a crisp finality: “Wild honey smells like freedom, / dust – like a ray of sun […] / Honeysuckle smells like water, / and an apple – like love. / But finally we’ve understood / that blood just smells like blood.”

***

In Italian, a word for happiness is spensierato. It is almost a synonym for carefree, meaning something like “without thought” (pensare – to think).

My friend says this is why poetry cannot help but be sad; it is full of thoughts.

***

I am meant to be reading about ecology in nineteenth century France but am instead looking out the window, transfixed by melting icicles dangling from the roof’s edge. They make diminishment beautiful, forms passing into a crystalline nothingness. Am I more sensitive to the tug of the past than others or simply less strong? When I drive, I think of the book we discussed in TechnoTexts, evening gatherings at the top of the art building, in a room populated with a sagging couch and Orthodox icons: Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Each hill and river defined by its given name, each landscape shrouded in stories overlapping, of peril and devotion. I am here now as I am here five years ago and fifteen years ago, and these selves are narrating all at once—this noiseless noise.

***

“but something sustained me, / and when you greeted me, / I was paid fully / for the long search / and the meagre lamp; / there was no ecstasy, vision, trance, / no years between, / only an end to the whole adventure, / it stops here; / there is no striving for strange ships, / Adamic delights; / I have tasted the apple.” —H.D., Hermetic Definition, 26

***

In the story of Tabitha, I find most arresting the image of the widows gathered, weeping, in the upper room, clutching the garments Tabitha had made. Look, she made the world beautiful for us, they seem to say. Though she is gone, look at the work of her hands (Acts 9:39).

***

The human condition: why long for orchards that perish and never the evergreen?

Why be fated to crave that which can only leave?

***

I sit with my friend on a bench in Les Arènes de Lutèce as teenagers shout and play soccer below us amid the Roman ruins. She pauses in her story, “I’m sorry,” she says in English, thinking through the order of events. “I’m lost in chronology.”

celandine green

April 9, 2022Leave a comment

“It’s all with me,” I think. Nothing of necessity has been left behind, despite the phantom fear of loss. Four trains later, Cambridge. Squinting into the sun against my hand, the act creates a tilting plane; devoted light, travelling far, flows around and through.

***

“Life has suddenly become overcrowded. Too many people I can care for are swarming in and filling up my chest. Too many things I want to do are rushing headlong into my new life for reasons unknown to me. All of a sudden my new life is like a field overgrown with strange flowers and exotic grasses or the shimmering, starry sky of my unbridled imagination…” -Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre, 30

***

The child tilts forward too fully, face pressed to the daffodil without restraint. His mother laughs and laughs, and I chuckle too, mere passerby to the scene. A robin perches along the path, assessing me from its twig, and I want to reach out, could almost bridge the distance, but I know the gesture would rupture the magic and I would lose its intelligent gaze. I would miss what it might dare to call to within myself. I feel such a well of love towards such things, towards the small woman with the cane in the gallery. She enters and her phone begins to ring, a tinkling music box melody. When she answers, her voice is surprisingly strong and merry, and I glance up from Woolf’s On Being Ill. The division of body and mind, illness as opening a place of interiority. “You’ve caught me at a very good place,” the woman says.

***

“Spring, summer, autumn, winter: / each season brings / its particular birds, whom I feed with crumbs. / …I am alone, I write nothing, / I thank / the gods for this great breadth / of empty light.” -Denise Levertov, “The Poet’s Late Autumn”

***

Regardless of season, the river keeps rushing, and my life decidedly means both everything and nothing. It is the greatest mystery and boundless act of hope. There was ice here before, in that other life. Winter. I remember a tender breaking, the musicality and abstraction of pools divided into fractals. Upon them lies no reflection, no finite substantiation.

***

“God hid himself so that the world could be seen / if he’d made himself known there would only be him / and who in his presence would notice the ant / […] love that is invisible / hides nothing” -Jan Twardowski, “The World”

***

In the atrium filling with shadows, I set down my teacup with a clatter.

Jià 嫁, meaning: to marry out of one’s home.

Gei 给, meaning: to give, given.

Qǔ 娶, meaning: to take a bride.

In Mandarin, men take a bride; women are given, poured out, no longer belonging, a farewell.

“After the ceremony, the bride’s family empties a pail of water as the couple departs,” she explains.

“Why? Is that a form of purification ritual?”

“No, no. It’s a very bittersweet moment. The water from the pail can never return.”

***

There is something even about bitterness that is sweet to me now. Is that what growing up means? To begin to savor all, praising a thing precisely for its absence, realizing what it is not and that this opposite has already been yours in a myriad of ways. The juxtaposition had its joys too, its shortcomings. After years of shunning espresso, now I make the pilgrimage to my local café and order a flat white or a latte and sit, expectant. Last time, the barista, mug in hand, winked at me across the room rather than shouting my name, and I smiled. It was not even the promise of something; it was the assurance of being seen.

***

“This earth, our only / This four-cornered honeycomb / Flooded with nectar and tombed / Foolishly, as bees drown / Tipsy on the sweetness of our little apocalypse / She spoke the Lord’s words without looking / Sound of sandpaper and butter over heat / Sound of butterflies landing / Sound of sweet pea and peony” -Sarah Beth Spraggins, “Crescent”

***

National COVID Memorial Wall, London: Along the Thames, the painted scarlet hearts stretch onward for blocks amid wilted bouquets, tealights, and Sharpie scrawlings: Always in our hearts. Darling. Loved and missed forever. Mum. I’m sorry you died alone. I miss you every day. Grandad. Rest in peace. An extraordinary man. In loving memory. No matter what. Remember them. A year after its creation, so many hearts are empty; so many are full.

***

“Near the wall of a house painted / to look like stone, / I saw visions of God. / […] Love is not the last room: there are others / after it, the whole length of the corridor / that has no end.” -Yehuda Amichai, “Near the Wall of a House”

***

There is a softness I know / and another I might be— / this is an endless parting.

***

In the crisp evening, shivering beneath my coat, a book nestled beneath my arm, the thought arrived. I was unprepared. I had been waiting, mesmerized by illuminated windows.

I’m going to write a novel.

***

By the river, your fingertips rest upon my shoulder, and I am so thankful. To be here. A friend.

starling murmuration

December 15, 2021December 15, 20211 Comment

These words have been fully formed since October, but I felt they needed a little extra time to incubate. As I walked the streets of Edinburgh a few days ago, I spotted starlings coalescing over rooftops, swirling in shapes and mystery—there for a moment and then gone. Quietly, strangely, I knew it was time.

“To love God through and across the destruction of Troy and of Carthage—and with no consolation. Love is not consolation, it is light.” -Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

***

The two small children, boy and girl, screech in glee as they race each other across the grass. Their mother follows behind as they raucously, inevitably, stray too far. They are babbling cheerily and pointing at the towering buildings as bees rustle in the flowers. The mother takes their hands, leading them away from my perch on the stone steps and the book I’ve glanced up from in enchanted interest. She smiles apologetically, “I’m sorry. I hope you didn’t come here for peace.” I smile and try to reassure her that all is well. I want to say: No, I did not come here for peace at all. I’ve seen enough of that.

***

Second rain. Is there a word for the drops that fall from trees, belated and too soon? When the clouds have parted and drifting passerby are caught unawares. I cannot help but flinch as a cold droplet falls upon my head, betrayed even as the sun peeks through truant autumn leaves—these boughs, a vessel of shelter then exposure. I think of how God must feel all of our suffering first—how He has and did—ages before it reaches us and again when we meet.

***

It spins like a wheel inside you: green yellow, green blue,
green beautiful green.
It’s simple: it isn’t over, it’s just begun. It’s green. It’s still green. -Richard Siken, “Meanwhile”

***

Illness. Ache in the chest. Do not bend, do not speak.

Listless, in bed, a return to Plath’s “Fever 103°:”

“Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves…

Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on…

I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern——

Does not my heat astound you! And my light!
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.”

***

Solace:

If I am sad, I can walk in any direction and find a bookshop, a church, a sculpture, a garden.

***

Praise God for bookshops with interminable hallways, slanted stacks, and mysterious basement catacombs. Praise God for conversations on Woolf and contemporary poetry. Praise God for all of the friends I haven’t met yet, for a family that can be hinted even in a day. Praise God for the grace in offering a teapot, a cup, the everyday mercy of honey dissolving in tea. Praise God for and through the hardest no. “It’s a shame as I’m sure you would have been a great success.”

***

“How privileged you are, to be passionately / clinging to what you love; / the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you. / Maestoso, doloroso: / This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us. / Surely it is a privilege to approach the end / still believing in something.” -Louise Glück, “October”

***

to desire / to turn

“Instead of ‘desire,’ [Katherine Bushnell] preferred to translate the word in Genesis 3:16 as ‘turning.'” –The Making of Biblical Womanhood, Beth Allison Barr

[Middle English desiren, from Old French desirer, from Latin dēsīderāre, to observe or feel the absence of, miss, desire : dē-, de- + sīderāre (as in cōnsīderāre, to observe attentively, contemplate)]

The original sense perhaps being “await what the stars will bring,” from the phrase de sidere “from the stars,” from sidus (genitive sideris) “heavenly body, star, constellation.”

***

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things. -T.S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”

***

In the dream, I am a filmstar and the scene begins and I don’t know any of my lines, never knew them to begin with. In the dream, there is a murder to solve and a house of many corridors and something lurking in the shadows. In the dream, we are slow dancing in an empty room and tears begin to fall silently, abstract on your shoulder.

***

“The train to Aberdeen is delayed. This is due to… a person being hit by a train.” The automated voice ricochets, repeating its dirge over and over at intervals, bluntly, blindly. “They really don’t need to say that every time, do they?” the older woman next to me murmurs on the platform. As strangers, we exist in the shadow of grief, a forlorn obituary for the unknown traveller.

***

Siken’s “Scheherazade” plays often in the background of my mind, pure autumn notes:

“Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.”

cosmic ache

December 7, 2020December 7, 20202 Comments

Words I find myself repeating quietly on walks by the river: “The world doesn’t know / what to do with my love. Because it isn’t used to / being loved… I hope it’s love. I’m trying really hard / to make it love. I said no more severity. I said it severely / and slept through all my appointments.” -Richard Siken, War of the Foxes, 40

***

The exhale you didn’t know you were holding. The early twilight. The candle flickering. The music on for dancing. The fragrant apple crumble coming out of the oven, slightly burnt but already beloved.

***

“I had nothing to build with. / It was winter: I couldn’t imagine / anything but the past. I couldn’t even / imagine the past, if it came to that. / And I didn’t know how I came here. / Everyone else much further along. / I was back at the beginning / at a time in life we can’t remember beginnings.” -Louise Glück, Vita Nova, 38

***

On Bonfire Night, a sudden flurry of sound—the harried rush to rest one’s elbows on the windowsill like a child at first snow. The fireworks are rising over Castle Sands, in arcs of red and gold. Several heartbeats brimming with light and pitch, then darkness again.

***

When Brigit Pegeen Kelly wrote “These are the long weeks. The weeks / of waiting. Let them be / Longer. Let the days smolder” (68), she might as well have been talking about Advent. I think of Tish Harrison Warren’s wording: a cosmic ache.

***

“Can this be paradise, with so much loss / in it? / Paradise / is defined by loss. / Is loss. / Is.” -Margaret Atwood

***

At the Kelvingrove Museum, I stood there the longest—in front of James Guthrie’s In the Orchard. Art has the strange and wonderful power to arrest you, drawing you near in surreptitious magnetism. The painting is giant, spanning an entire wall, crafted in hues of emerald and umber. I couldn’t stop looking at the girl, kneeling in a black dress, her face inscrutable and resigned. She seemed as if deep in thought, or perhaps she had just stopped crying. The boy extends his basket of apples, looking down passively. She is the focal point, and even the geese in the background incline their heads, eager to see what will happen next. It is a story told a thousand times over but each time rewritten. The girl extends her arm, preparing to place an apple into the basket, pausing just before. A recreation of Eden. She seems to sense all that hangs in the balance. She is striking a deal and knows not what comes next. She is bonded now. Her eyes fix on the apple, even as she clutches another with her left hand, as if reconsidering. She does not want to let go. An analogy for love?

***

A quote from The Great Gatsby so beautiful it haunts: “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.”

***

In the cathedral yesterday, tears came. Unexpected visitors, unexpected guests. Months since I had partaken in communion. The priest saw me outside, craning my neck and trying to capture the arcs of stone while waiting for a friend. “Taking pictures, eh?” he said with a chuckle, and I shrugged, sheepish, “It’s a gorgeous building.” It was when the children came filing in, knotted to each other or hovering mothers and fathers. It was when the priest knelt in his violet robe to look a little girl in the eye, a toddler with messy blonde hair and her fingers in her mouth. He gave her the body of Christ, solemnly and joyfully at once, and her mother smiled on, pregnant with another. And I thought of Mary. And the violinist played on, a melody searing and true. And I could hear the music all around but could not see the source, so I turned to my friend at last: “Where’s the violinist?” I asked, bewildered. “Oh, just behind the column. You simply can’t see her yet.” And the music filled the room. And I felt as if my life couldn’t quite be my life, as if I’d been inserted into a film unawares. And I knew there was a lesson in it all—if only I could find it, if only I could write about it.

***

“I want to leave / no one behind. / To keep / & be kept. / The way a field turns / its secrets / into peonies. The way light / keeps its shadow / by swallowing it.” -Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 39

***

Why is it that I read Louise Glück’s Vita Nova over and over these days but, when my friend asks me what it is about, I cannot answer? All I can say: “Memory.”

***

“He changes times and seasons… He reveals deep and hidden things.” -Daniel 2:21,22a (NIV)

***

“Dear [G]od, if you are a season, let it be the one I passed through / to get here. / Here. That’s all I wanted to be. / I promise.” -Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 72

***

Anne Carson writes in “The Glass Essay” about women with a vocation of anger, but I think there’s a vocation of remembrance too—and I think it aches.

***

When Glück writes, You changed me, you should remember me.

When Glück writes, I thought my life was over and my heart was broken. Then I moved to Cambridge.

***

I want to be crammed so full of beauty that it overflows.

attention, art, & love: quarantine thoughts

May 14, 20202 Comments

“The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?

My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.

Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.” —Marie Howe

***

“Daddy, she looks like a good person. Doesn’t she look like a good person?” The little boy chattering in the Target shopping cart, gripping a toy shaped like a beige egg, suddenly turns his clairvoyant eyes towards me. A good person. I smile broadly behind the gray confines of my mask and hope that a timid wave and a softening in my eyes can somehow be enough to convey a burst of joy. Soon, their cart rolls out of view, and I realize with a start that I will never know what was trapped within that egg, aching to emerge.

***

“Art. Love. What’s the difference, really?” My friend says with a shrug, and when he smiles his eyes crumple into celebratory lines, like confetti mid-descent.

***

A few nights back, I had a dream that I was running, breathless, from something or someone. The only shelter was the church ahead, but I was barefoot; I couldn’t enter without shoes. My friend appeared in an adjacent doorway and kindly gave me his sneakers without a second thought. I rushed inside, only to see a face turn away in hurt.

***

December 9th, 2019:

“I bumped into a friend today, dressed brightly and carrying an umbrella. I rushed over to huddle under too, and we laughed when it bopped my head. We spoke of those graduating in December and exchanged a mutual frazzled look. We both expressed how charmed we are to be waiting ’till May, delaying the inevitable, taking our time with growing old. We parted ways. The rain fell.

Now I am sitting at Blackberry Market, and, though it is echoey and empty and strange, it is altogether like a second home. I think the baristas know me (embarrassing or flattering?) and my signature mug by now. I’ve settled in, to this seat, yes, but also here at large. It is making sense to me now. I drove friends to the store yesterday and knew the twists and turns and street names—no GPS needed. More friends stayed in my apartment until 2:00 am because they couldn’t bear to leave; they told me it felt like home, and I could see in their eyes that they were hungry for belonging. We listened to my Frank Sinatra Christmas vinyl and jazz and then fell into comfortable, companionable silence. I went off to bed, and a few still lingered there. As I drifted off to sleep, I bemusedly thought about this feeling—like that of a parent with children sleeping over. I fell asleep to the lullaby of whispered conversation and spurts of contained laughter. Tenderness.”

***

Lady Bird: “Well, I was just describing it.”

Sister Sarah Joan: “Well, it comes across as love.”

Lady Bird: “Sure, I guess I pay attention.”

Sister Sarah Joan: “Don’t you think they’re the same thing? Love and attention?”

***

January 13th, 2020, four months ago, first day of final semester:

“I make small talk with the girl beside me at the CPO window. We shared a ride together once from Midway; her friend drove us and insisted on me not paying. I smile and turn to leave, and she shouts after me: ‘Take care!’ I didn’t expect it, but it rings in my ears as I step out into the grey afternoon.

I drive to Twice as Nice and find that the dress I’ve been pining over for weeks is gone. I buy a cozy grey sweater instead and pay in all quarters. The woman at the register excitedly exclaims that they are just what she needs. She is almost out of quarters, she says. And pennies.

We are always filling in the gaps, whether we know it or not. I am amazed today by how we are able to be so many things to so many people, shifting and morphing in and out—how God stitches us into the complexity of His story. We may never know when our presence, our words, or our actions turn out to be exactly what someone else needs.

Earlier, in chapel, Dr. Ryken said, ‘It is when we reach the end of our own limited resources that God is able to do all that He can do.'”

***

“We have so little of each other, now… Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy? These fleeting temples we make together when we say, ‘Here, have my seat,’ ‘Go ahead—you first,’ ‘I like your hat.'”—Danusha Lameris

***

Another dream: On a road trip, I suddenly realized my luggage had mysteriously vanished from the car. Then, I could see it, there, waiting for me along the sidewalk. We were in bumper-to-bumper traffic, so I jumped out of the vehicle and barreled after it. The black form kept getting further and further away, and I turned to see the car had left me behind.

***

JO: “Perhaps… perhaps I was too quick in turning him down.”

MARMEE: “Do you love him?”

JO: “If he asked me again, I think I would say yes… Do you think he’ll ask me again?”

MARMEE: “But do you love him?”

JO (tearing up): “I care more to be loved. I want to be loved.”

MARMEE: “That is not the same as loving.”

JO (crying, trying to explain herself to herself): “You know, I just feel like women… they have minds and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it, but… I am so lonely.”

***

“I know you are reading this poem / as the underground train loses momentum and before running / up the stairs / toward a new kind of love. / I know you are reading this poem listening for something torn / between bitterness and hope / turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse. / I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else / left to read.” —Adrienne Rich