(Poem #244)Unwise Purchases
They sit around the house not doing much of anything: the boxed set of the complete works of Verdi, unopened. The complete Proust, unread: The French-cut silk shirts which hang like expensive ghosts in the closet and make me look exactly like the kind of middle-aged man who would wear a French-cut silk shirt: The reflector telescope I thought would unlock the mysteries of the heavens but which I only used once or twice to try to find something heavenly in the windows of the high-rise down the road, and which now stares disconsolately at the ceiling when it could be examining the Crab Nebula: The 30-day course in Spanish whose text I never opened, whose dozen cassette tapes remain unplayed, save for Tape One, where I never learned whether the suave American conversing with a sultry-sounding desk clerk at a Madrid hotel about the possibility of obtaining a room actually managed to check in. I like to think that one thing led to another between them and that by Tape Six or so they're happily married and raising a bilingual child in Seville or Terra Haute. But I'll never know. Suddenly I realize I have constructed the perfect home for a sexy, Spanish-speaking astronomer who reads Proust while listening to Italian arias, and I wonder if somewhere in this teeming city there lives a woman with, say, a fencing foil gathering dust in the corner near her unused easel, a rainbow of oil paints drying in their tubes on the table where the violin she bought on a whim lies entombed in the permanent darkness of its locked case next to the abandoned chess set, a woman who has always dreamed of becoming the kind of woman the man I've always dreamed of becoming has always dreamed of meeting. And while the two of them discuss star clusters and Cézanne, while they fence delicately in Castilian Spanish to the strains of Rigoletto, she and I will stand in the steamy kitchen, fixing up a little risotto, enjoying a modest cabernet, while talking over a day so ordinary as to seem miraculous. |
Unwise Purchases -- George Bilgere
Reluctance -- Robert Frost
(Poem #243)Reluctance
Out through the fields and the woods And over the walls I have wended; I have climbed the hills of view And looked at the world, and descended; I have come by the highway home, And lo, it is ended. The leaves are all dead on the ground, Save those that the oak is keeping To ravel them one by one And let them go scraping and creeping Out over the crusted snow, When others are sleeping. And the dead leaves lie huddled and still, No longer blown hither and thither; The last lone aster is gone; The flowers of the witch hazel wither; The heart is still aching to seek, But the feet question "Whither?" Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season? |