Travel Safely Chicky! So good to see you!

And L-Bo and Filo. It's bittersweet recalling how easy it was to have an afternoon like this one, walking down to lunch at Betty's (YUM!) and talking about poets and jobs and just life, but we're all elsewhere from where we met and it's likely we'll never live near one another again. But that urgency, that need to keep people close and remind them that any minute could change our proximity has only ever made me frantic and them less-responsive. This loose grip is better. I am fine here and it is SO nice to have an apartment of which I am proud and don't hide away from people. I hung sheers up in the study and the light through them is clean and serene. That fresh early morning light.

I have a couple of tasks before evening and then (a wonder!) another L-Bo event. We are cinema-ing, although what we're seeing is to be decided.
Today's poem goes out to Kathy--the dearest friend I'll ever have.

The Pomegranate

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere.And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted.Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate!How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry.I could warn her.There is still a chance.
The rain is cold.The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world.But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it.As I have.
She will wake up.She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips.I will say nothing.

Eavan Boland