10/27/03
By what we have determined,
The kindest of loves is not to love
But keep ourselves impervious apart.
It's like that kid we read about last year
Who, smiling, watched his sister drown;
Told the papers
He didn't want her to grow up this way -
In this world where summers are short
And we don't have much time to swim
Before the lake is frozen, and we under it
Wait, distilled, to breathe again
In curses against our mothers.
"It's better not to breathe," he said.
And for kids in high school English, several authors
Portray their Hamlets and their Christs
Inside the common man.
They elucidate how peasant eyes
Are symbolic eyes of drowning God,
How selfless men evict their selfless souls
From the seething earth, all in one great act
Of instinctual religion. We learn by rote
To clap at these authors of a new realism
Who know how gallant isolation
Keeps us all from pain.
But
There was a girl who knew herself no Ophelia
And sometimes would admit:
She had once laid down her burdens
And let a neighbor share her cross partway.
She had on occasion beckoned some around her
To dine and fast as she would,
Hoping they mgiht somehow share each other.
She had fallen in love, even pulling others
Into such sure agony.
Because, better than high school English,
She remembered parents' joy
At their own ability to feed their hungry child.
She recalled the pleasure
Of the lover who is selfishly coveted.
Hers was an outdated classical notion
Taht loving is give and take
Instead of selfless ownership.
We love selfless around here
So as not to inflict an eventaul pain.
She may have drowned one day
For someone else's selfless sacrifice,
But she knew as she was Baptized so,
Knew before the light closed in around her,
That she would rather be loved
In selfishness
Than in kindness.
