Sonnet XLIII

Other people's poetry is never as good as mine. Hardly ever. I'm wonderful. But every now and then something worthwhile might be found. Thus, this, by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

*****

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

****

This may be the only Christmas present I give you. Achingly beautiful. Its immorality doesn't even bother me, with its intimations of illicit love affairs. I've matured, it seems. Grown more tolerant. Solitude has not made me bitter. My bitterness seeps from some darker and more troubled cistern.

Do not think it has cost me nothing. I started paying the day I was born. I thought I was still too young to be so heavy with regret. But I've matured, it seems. Now I think of young people, with their cravings and their yearnings, and wonder what's so wrong with finding happiness, for a time -- in clinging, so close it might be inside, to some tender lover who breathes her breath into you the way wind feeds fire? I think of standing toe to toe, holding her neck and tasting lips as soft and sweet and red as honeyed rose petals.

Well. There is no promise of love. We live in bodies designed to fit one into the other, but this is not a promise, as it is not a commandment. It's simply a fact.

By now I have no judgments left, even for those who rebel against so primal and clear a directive as that a man's mate is a woman. Those whose inclinations, through nature or circumstance, tend to their own kind -- I can no longer mock the yearnings of their hearts. To choose solitude is a hard thing, and all secret love affairs are secret. We must dread, everyone, the day our hearts become known.

It is only stubbornness that has kept my hands clean of blood. This is no virtue. If our actions have been purer than our souls, it will be through missed opportunity, through insufficient temptation, through fear of discovery. If there were no God, everyone would count himself a god.

We find beauty where we may, then, and comfort ourselves as best we can. So much the better, if we can share happiness. If we can't -- if the best we can manage is not to cause pain? -- well, some of us might crave and yearn for that simple blessing. There are worse things than settling.


J