NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/rec/arts/books/23703

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-02 | 4.1 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Barbara Hlavin)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Reading as an addiction (Was: 92 in rabreview)
Date: 2 Jan 1993 21:35:14 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
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NNTP-Posting-Host: milton.u.washington.edu

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail]
(Paul Moloney) writes:
>
>There was once a girl I know whose place I went to after a party.
>We'd been friends for a while, and I wondered would, or could,
>our relationship go any further. One look at her bedroom, which contained
>no books apart from one of the tackiest holiday romances I'd ever
>seen (it had a photo instead of artwork on the cover), disassuaded
>me of this notion.
>
No pedagogic instincts, I see.

Celebrating the new year by cleaning the bedroom, I have just
removed from under the edge of the bed the following books:
_A River Runs Through It_, Norman Maclean; _The Rituals
of Dinner_, Margaret Visser; _Everything Tastes Better Outdoors_,
Claudia Roden; and _Moon Crossing Bridge_, Tess Gallagher's first
collection of poetry since Raymond Carver died.
:

What, I wonder, would a potential beau make of this?  (And what
would he be doing burrowing under my bed, anyway?)  Perhaps he
would start to plan a fishing trip, and a week's worth of
menus.  We could sit under the moon and read this poem:

Crazy Menu

Last of his toothpaste, last of his Wheat Chex, last
of his 5-Quick-Cinnamon-Rolls-With-Icing, his
Pop Secret Microwave Pop-
corn, his Deluxe Fudge Brownie Mix next to my
Casbah Nutted Pilaf on the sparser
shelf.  I'm using it all up.  Chanting: he'd-want-me-
to-he'd-want-me-to. To consume loss like a hydra-headed
meal of would-have-dones accompanied by
missed-shared-delight.  What can I tell you?
I'm a lost proof.
But something eats with me, a darling of
the air-that-is.  It smacks its unkissable lips and
pours me down with a gleam in its unblinkable eye, me--
the genius loci of his waiting room to this feast of rapidly
congealing unobtainables.  Oh-me-of-
the last-of-his-lastness through which I am gigantically
left over like the delight of Turkish

Delight.  Don't haul out your memory vault to
cauterize my green-with-moment-thumb.  Or shove me
into the gloom-closet of yet another cannibalistic
*Nevermore*.  I've been there.  And there too.  It was not
unusual--that bravado of a castrato in a brothel
yanking his nose and waxing paradisal.  No, I'm more like
a Polish miner who meets a Chinese miner at a
helmet convention in Amsterdam.  Because we both
speak a brand of Philip Morris English picked up
from a now extinct murmur heard only impromptu
at a certain caved-in depth, we are overwhelmed by
the sheer fact of meeting and we clasp
each other by our bare heads for nights, exchanging
the unimpoverishable secrets of the earth, the going down and
the coming up, the immutable pretext of light, a common history
of slumped canaries, of bereaved kinfolk, of black-lunged
singers and handmade coffins.  We trade
a few eulogies and drinking songs and sit down at last to
a huge meal of aged cheese and kippers.
We lean into our vitals

with all the lights off.  It's dark inside and out.
This is our last chance to revel in the unencumbered
flickering of Balinese tapers we bought at
a souvenir stand above the canal.  Like rice and spit
we are tolerant of all occasions, this being
the lifting of the dread whereby
the girls' wings we autograph onto our duffle coats
have been painted like butterflies, only
on the upside so the dark is mocked by
our raised arms, our fluttered concentration, uncollectable as
the lastness I am of him I love-ed
scribbled unsentimentally on a valentine in 1983:
    *To the King of my Heart!*
In daylight we pick up our tinned rations and hike off,
every artery and nerve of us, into the rest
of our commemorative lives.


--Barbara