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Dead poets make lovely friends.

Ah, hell. I was going to go to bed, but I can't resist. 


And you as well must die, beloved dust
And all your beauty stand you in no stead;
This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,
This body of flame and steel, before the gust
Of Death, or under his autumnal frost, 
Shall be as any leaf, be no less dead
Than the first leaf that fell,-- this wonder fled
Altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost.
Nor shall my love avail you in your hour.
In spite of all my love, you will arise 
Upon that day and wander down the air 
Obscurely as the unattended flower,
It mattering not how beautiful you were
Or how beloved above all else that dies.

When I was in, oh, tenth grade, I took a poetry elective. We were 
assigned to find a sonnet and memorise it to recite in class. I had never 
read Edna St. Vincent Millay before. I'd never really read poetry before. 
Ithought it wasn't quite my thing-- the whole class was a lark, an 
experiment. But then I found this, her Sonnet xix, and I realised I 
couldn't recite it in class because I couldn't stop myself from crying 
every single time I read it. I was stunned.

I have a collection of her sonnets that has become much, much more than a 
book to me. I keep mementos in its pages, pressed against whatever sonnet 
seems to suit them.

The above sonnet (xix)  has a paper I found taped to my door one morning 
in my first year of college, from the head of Student Affairs and the 
administration, that one of my fellow Novo Collegians had killed himself 
by self-immolation late the night before. It was the first time someone I 
knew, someone like me, had died. We hadn't been so very close, but I 
couldn't stop thinking of this sonnet.

When the first boy who ever liked me back suddenly didn't anymore, later 
that very same year, I thought I was brokenhearted. I discovered what 
that really meant after graduation four years later. The boy and I hadn't 
spoken in years, after fits of teenage angst. I finally went to go look 
for him, on a whim, to see if we could at least be friends. Hours later, 
mutual friend of ours had to tell me that he'd been killed just days 
before by a drunk driver. His memorial and the address of the fund set up 
in his name sits next to #ix:

I think I should have loved you presently,
And given in earnest words I flung in jest;
And lifted honest eyes for you to see,
And caught your hand against my cheek and breast;
And all my pretty follies flung aside
That won you to me, and beneath your gaze,
Naked of reticence and shorn of pride,
Spread like a chart my little wicked ways.
I, that had been to you, had you remained,
But one more waking from a recurrent dream,
Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained,
And walk your memory's halls, austere, supreme,
A ghost in marble of a girl you knew
Who would have loved you in a day or two.


One day, years ago during the Georgia ren faire, a boy gave me a page 
from his journal-- he'd had a dream about me, a strange dream of spiders 
and lost souls. Maybe it was the look in his eyes, maybe it was the 
Sundays tape he played every morning. But his page is tucked in beside 
xxix:


Pity me not because the light of day
At close of day no longer walks the sky;
Pity me not for beauties passed away
From field and thicket as the year goes by;
Pity me not the waning of the moon,
Nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea,
Nor that a man's desire is hushed so soon,
And you no longer look with love on me.
This have I known always: Love is no more
Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales:
Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.



Look: next to #xxix in the "Fatal Interview" sequence, insouciant in red 
and black, is the cocky blond juggler I had such a terrible crush on for 
so many years at another Faire. 


Heart, have no pity on this house of bone:
Shake it with dancing, break it down with joy.
No man holds mortgage on it; it is your own;
To give, to sell at auction, to destroy.
When you are blind to moonlight on the bed,
When you are deaf to gravel on the pane,
Shall quavering caution from this house instead
Cluck forth at summer mischief in the lane?
     All that delightful youth forbears to spend
     Molestful age inherits, and the ground
     Will have us; therefore, while we're young, my friend--
The Latin's vulgar, but the advice is sound.
Youth, have no pity; leave no farthing here
For age to invest in compromise and fear.



And then, just a few years ago, after turning again to the 
now-knocked-around volume for more words of wisdom, I found a place 
(xlvi) for that little snapshot of Lars and the last, cluelessly cheerful 
letter he sent me, at which I defiantly flung my tears and smeared the 
ink:

Even in the moment of our earliest kiss,
When sighed the straitened bud into the flower,
Sat the dry seed of most unwelcome this;
And that I knew, though not the day and hour.
Too season-wise am I, being country-bred,
To tilt at autumn or defy the frost:
Snuffing the chill even as my fathers did,
I say with them, "What's out tonight is lost."
I only hoped, with the mild hope of all
Who watch the leaf take shape upon the tree,
A fairer summer and a later fall
Than in these parts a man is apt to see,
And sunny clusters ripened for the wine:
I tell you this across the blackened vine.


It's not just a book of poems from a long-dead lady; she wrote little 
print pictures, slices of my life in perfectly distilled, concentrated 
pastilles in blue and red and purple-- she wrote my life before I lived 
it. Now I page through the remaining sonnets and wonder what I'll tuck 
between them in the years to come. Ugly or beautiful or sad or 
blindingly-bright, this little volume will catalogue me and reflect me 
and remind me and, as ever, ease me like a good friend.








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