Intellectual Dishonesty

My previous post was a kind of lie. No, not really a lie, but a protection. An intellectual distance from the actual, the raw falling-apart-ness of my present experience.

Truth is: am anxious and afraid. What now?

The day comes to good in a Robert Hass poem, "Regalia For A Black Hat Dancer." Literature is friendship, as Kerouac said, and when I can't manage to make a friend of myself, and am cautious from leaning too heavily on others, I find a poem. Buffer against hopelessness--that is the art.


"Walking down to Heart's Desire beach in the summer evenings
of the year my marriage ended--

though I was hollowed out by pain
honeycombed with the pain of it,
like the bird bones on the beach
the salt of the bay water had worked on for a season--
such surprising lightness in the hand--
I don't think I could have told the pain of loss
from the pain of possibility,
though I knew they weren't the same thing.

When I think of that time, I think mainly of the osprey's cry,
a startled yelp,
the cry more a color than a sound, and as if
it ripped the sky, was white,
as if it were scar tissue and fresh hurt at once."