021410

Frequently over the past week I've caught myself thinking, "I need to remember to tell ma about this." Gone is the woman who consoled me when I was disconsolate, who helped me make a little sense of the world, who made it all right that I was heartbroken. Toward the end of her life, there were numerous topics we simply couldn't broach, for the sake of our friendship; mostly those appear to have been topics related to her increasing conservatism, religious, political, financial. As long as we didn't talk about such things, we managed to share an enviable relationship. We had a great many things in common, literacy, high intelligence, an experience of the world in which most people don't have the courage to speak to us, etc. At the very end we had to keep it to topics like Mad Men, movies, natural perfume, etc. She was always at the other end of the line, my loving mother, the first person I knew when I came to consciousness 40 years ago.

*Old-poem*

I found this among my mother's things; it's a poem set to a background photo of my mother. I used to love this kind of thing, putting graphics on top of photos:

Dear Ma

Here is just a note to say that I hope you are feeling well, and to thank you for _everything_, and to tell you that I love you. I was thinking the other night--it was the sort feeling that came to me that planned to make itself into a poem--that you have taught me, among a great many other things, to have a sort of breathless admiration, an intense but silent and sincere reverence, for the mystery around us. I wanted to say that I try to pass that reverence on to the people around me--I will continue for as long as I can. All my love for now, until we speak again. Adam

It's bitter to realize we won't speak again.

*Lawrence-Ferlinghetti*

When I was younger, my mother kept a handwritten book around. In it, she had transcribed her favorite quotations, favorite poems, favorite passages from prose, etc. One poem we read again and again together (I was five or six) was I am Waiting by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. By exposing me to this poem, my mother made me into an anti-establishmentarian, into a frothing-at-the-mouth radical liberal, into a person deeply mistrustful of authority and government. I'm not sure if that was her intention or not, but I know this poem echoes in my mind at every juncture. Every line has been reflected in every word of poetry I've written. This, for me, _is_ "the great indelible poem." Here are the first, third, and final stanzas:

I am Waiting (Lawrence Ferlinghetti)

I am waiting for my case to come up

and I am waiting

for a rebirth of wonder

and I am waiting for someone

to really discover America

and wail

and I am waiting

for the discovery

of a new symbolic western frontier

and I am waiting

for the American Eagle

to really spread its wings

and straighten up and fly right

and I am waiting

for the Age of Anxiety

to drop dead

and I am waiting

for the war to be fought

which will make the world safe

for anarchy

and I am waiting

for the final withering away

of all governments

and I am perpetually awaiting

a rebirth of wonder.

I am waiting for my number to be called

and I am waiting

for the living end

and I am waiting

for dad to come home

his pockets full

of irradiated silver dollars

and I am waiting

for the atomic tests to end

and I am waiting happily

for things to get much worse

before they improve

and I am waiting

for the Salvation Army to take over

and I am waiting

for the human crowd

to wander off a cliff somewhere

clutching its atomic umbrella

and I am waiting

for Ike to act

and I am waiting

for the meek to be blessed

and inherit the earth

without taxes

and I am waiting

for forests and animals

to reclaim the earth as theirs

and I am waiting

for a way to be devised

to destroy all nationalisms

without killing anybody

and I am waiting

for linnets and planets to fall like rain

and I am waiting for lovers and weepers

to lie down together again

in a new rebirth of wonder.

I am waiting

to get some intimations

of immortality

by recollecting my early childhood

and I am waiting

for the green mornings to come again

youth's dumb green fields come back again

and I am waiting

for some strains of unpremeditated art

to shake my typewriter

and I am waiting to write

the great indelible poem

and I am waiting

for the last long careless rapture

and I am perpetually waiting

for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn

to catch each other up at last

and embrace

and I am awaiting

perpetually and forever

a renaissance of wonder.

*Poem*

Are We Here?

She told me once the doctors said

my brother and I shouldn't

even be alive, judging from her

various illnesses.

We shouldn't even be alive.

Almost as if we weren't really,

not actually alive; all we saw

were figments of our imaginations.

I have often thought of this fact,

as I bungled my way through life.

"Doesn't really matter because

I'm not really here," or

"No one will know because

I don't really exist," or

"How can there be harm done by

someone who doesn't in fact

walk the earth?"

I have always felt almost there,

almost here, almost alive.

I have longed to sink my teeth

into the meat of living

but have imagined I've been

preempted, forever just missing

the boat, permanently on leave

from a life I scarcely inhabit.

*Quotations*

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

--Edna St Vincent Millay

Death is a Dialogue between

The Spirit and the Dust.

--Emily Dickinson

Thus that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist.

--Epicurus

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

--Ernest Becker

Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.

--Bertolt Brecht

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

--George Bernard Shaw

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

--George Santayana

The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others, no sir.

--Tennessee Williams

Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.

--Nathaniel Hawthorne

Dying is like coming to the end of a long novel--you only regret it if the ride was enjoyable and left you wanting more.

--Jerome P Crabb

Peace love and ATOM jazz