A Heart in Every Bite

“You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can’t express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn’t hurt any more: that’s my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.”

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”

I knew that what was left of me would always love you, but never in quite the same way.

“I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy as the bee who droned above our heads. In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again. Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched.”

“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”