Dirge Without Music

BB reads a poem

BB is standing in for me this week because I am not resigned to putting my face on here all the time and besides, this whole charade cracks me up. It’s so much easier for me to be someone else, to wear the mask, and smile. One of the many things I love about BB is how she doesn’t smile. Her lips are parted like she’s about to say something, or she’s thinking about the dream she had in the wee hours of the morning. And what better face is there for reciting a poem about death? I’d be all macabre and maybe cry and make people feel even more awkward than they do watching a doll recite a poem about death or grief.

I got walloped the other day by a smell. Smells bring back feelings of loss with such force it grabs me by the ankle and throws me into a churning abyss. I know this happens to many people. Yeah, you feel it, too. That monster obeys no laws of nature or decency. Mine rides on currents of jasmine, Love’s Baby Soft perfume, Oil of Olay, the briny ocean on a rainy day in Spring, and beer breath. One moment I’m fine, the next I’m in mourning for a moment in time, a laugh, a touch, or the heartbeat of someone I’ve lost.

All of this is surely compounded my my recent dissection of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series that I’m rereading for the umpteenth time. When I’m stuck in my own writing, it’s usually a plot issue. I try to be so consistant in my real life, that my senses of moderation and assimilation govern my willingness to debauch and murder in the fictional world. So, I go into the stories I know very well like Outlander, and read them with the intention of observing craft choices—plot, sentence structure, analogies, tensions, and willingness to torture her characters and also bring them to the heights of pleasure. I must not forget to allow my characters some pleasure, aye? At the moment tho, I am thinking about how she uses these heights of pleasure to compound the feelings of loss. What a manipulator she is! Of note is also how willing I am to be manipulated by her. Thus the tears and my willingness to resurrect even my old losses because Gabaldon promises there is always joy on the other side.

Dirge Without Music

By Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—

They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled

Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

Ciao, n