The Smallness of Large
If it weren't for Molly,
I would not be outside
on this cold night, head
tilted back like a Pez dispenser,
tilting back down again as she
continues her business, nothing
coming from my mouth
but the warmth of my own
breath, me blowing out over
and over again to see the whiteness
of living, looking up (to be polite
while she's in the middle
of her business) once more to notice
the outlines of constellations,
the vast emptiness of a sky
filled with the appearance
of small, the largeness of being
reduced to negligible.
3 comments:
a quiet reflective very open piece. nice work. and the image of being polite haha. i love it.
the title of your blog -- isn't that a quote from thomas wolfe? seems he used it somewhere in either look homeward angel or you can't go home again.
when i was seventeen, eighteen years old, and encountered wolfe's work for the first time, i was delirious with my hunger for his words, which swept over me in a way that heretofore i had not imagined literature could even aspire to.
I was just coming to pull this thinking how trite it was...
you know how I am, jim...
even woke in the night thinking about it--how the title was all wrong, how I didn't mention the branches and the clouds partially covering the moon (overdone images but I had some ideas about them that I thought might be fresh),how I didn't get across that smallness of large feeling that I wanted to express, etc., etc.
...thank you for reading me, as always, and for finding something worth commenting on in this...
yes, Thomas Wolfe...like you, I could not get enough of him when I was 18 or so...the quote is the opening of Look Homeward Angel--my favorite...I am ready to reread Wolfe and hope I'll still embrace the words the way I did then, but that may not happen
you can't go home again, ya know?
thanks, friend.
A stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces...
...Oh lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
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