November 4

There is something kind of liberating about having missed a couple of days already, you know?

So, Galway Kinnell died. He was a poet hero of mine. I loved his work and had the pleasure of meeting him and hearing him read a handful of times. He was such a lion, such a majestic voice. He was my Walt Whitman.

The world feels a little darker without him.

Here is one of my very favorite of his poems - and one I could most certainly recite from memory for much of my adult life.

Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

***