Sublime

“Most poets are poor, dreary fellows who hang about at the court in hope of a pension. I should not like to see you join them.”

The only good present my mother ever got me was a book called Letters: Summer 1926, about the three-way correspondence between Rilke, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva, and Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago. The three had never met, but they adored each other’s work, and for four years they all wrote sonnets and sent them to one

Why mortals bloomed like flowers and crumbled to nothing? Why their absence left a gnawing ache, a hollow void that could never be filled? And how everything they once were, that spark within them, could be extinguished so completely yet the world did not collapse under the weight of so much pain and grief.’

Pute DeLyon, the odette.

Helter skelter, hang sorrow, care’ll kill a cat, Mary Beth whispered. Up-tails all, and a Louse for the Hangman. I blinked, surprised at this outburst of Ben Jonson from a girl not yet ten.

epigram