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HOW DO I LOVE THEE?

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

from Sonnets from the Portuguese

everyone is the other

i do believe that fear of the 'other' is genetically encoded in each of us, presumably to build strong families and communities, as these are the modes of survival. particularly when you're nomads, wandering in the desert.

i wonder what our genes think of cyberspace. or is our growing likelihood to spend a fair percentage of our socializing while sitting alone at a desk also genetically determined as a response to overpopulation.

but in the current climate of world-wide community, is this genetic imperative as out of date as dragging women around by their hair? in a word... YES!

this train of thought began first thing in the morning when i heard a commentator on the radio announce that the TLC program, 'All-American Muslims" would be cancelled due to advertisers, under pressure from a right fringe group complaining that the evil side of muslims was being hidden & that the whole show was propaganda, pulled out of the show.

he had it wrong. in fact the network is hoping that all the uproar will help the show's ratings. but i still cringe at the mention of that much hatred, that much fear. and it started me thinking about how i usually saw this kind of hatred when it had been encouraged by someone for political reasons. and in this country it's the right that's pretty much the sole contender for the role.

so as i say, i started wondering about how that old genetic drive would come out now, if it were never aroused because someone thought they could benefit in terms of money and power by doing it. and i can barely conceive of it.

if we were never told, well, let's let the song from South Pacific say it best:

YOU'VE GOT TO BE CAREFULLY TAUGHT

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's
too late,
Before you are six or seven
or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

we have learned much, in our 'modern' times, about how we no longer have a need to brainlessly act on every genetic imperative. we have been thrown together in shared experiences. is it possible for us to embrace those experiences, those people?

or is this actually something we can never accomplish? if we had the drive to create all these religions (which are all the same at base), all these empowered entities, maybe there is something integral to our very fiber about those boundaries, those fences, those tightly closed gates.

but then, when have you hated the most beautiful girl in the room, or the neighbor whose yard wasn't kept as you liked it? when have you behaved as primitively as a carefully taught being, and can you, could anyone, just not ever be taught?

i once saw in a shop that had a strong anti-ivory stance a postcard that said 'we are all elephants.'

today, we are all muslims.

why i don't believe in hell

my father kinda looked like a mixture of mayor bloomberg and alexander nikolaevich yakovlev (photo composit). today would have been his 99th birthday, if he had not died in 1980.

he smoked a pipe, sometimes cigarettes, he had a manhattan every night when he got home from the office. with a cherry. and he played 'fur elise' on the piano. he bought himself an eames chair, and was always the second son, the one least favored.

as a pup, he had done some disc jockeying on the radio, and he was the best dancer i ever met.

when i came home from dates, he would be sitting at the dining room table eating corn flakes and reading the paper.

as i thought about him, new of his talents kept popping into my mind. singing 'scarlet ribbons.' acting in musicals at the jewish center -- 'captain sammy's showboat' (directed by my mother). he could draw middling good, and had wanted to go to art school, but ended up following in his older brother's footsteps to go to medical school at the university of chicago.

a month before he died, my mother's mother died. in the car on the way to the funeral he cracked jokes the whole time.













when i look at him in the tangle of my memory, i can only seem to find a mangled creature, partially melted into himself, some darkened parts that look like they might be from burns.










no, i don't think i'm seeing him now. i thinking i'm finally seeing him with clarity, he who will always be in my memory. how can one believe in hell? a man may spend some kind smiles in his lifetime but if he also places his own pain & fear & terrors onto his children with a scream and the back of a hand, he is being rightly tortured at that time.

send in the clowns

CLOWNS: speakers of the truth; trickster -- creator of the world; defenders against the evil spirits.

i've looked at clowns from both sides now
from fools to frights and still somehow
it's clowns illusions i recall --
i really don't know clowns at all.

What kind of fool am I
Who never fell in love
It seems that I'm the only one
that I have been thinking of

What kind of man is this?
An empty shell--
A lonely cell in which
an empty heart must dwell

What kind of lips are these
That lied with every kiss
That whispered empty words of love
that left me alone like this

Why can't I fall in love
Like any other man
And maybe then I'll know
what kind of fool I am.

What kind of clown am I?
What do I know of life?
Why can't I cast away the mask of play
and live my life?

Why can't I fall in love
Till I don't give a damn
And maybe then
I'll know what kind of fool I am

Anthony Newley •

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off

blue skies

PRINCIPALITIES OF JUNE

Original light broke apart,
the Gnostics say,
when time began,

singular radiance
fractioned into form
— an easy theory

to believe,
in early summer,
when that first performance

seems repeated daily.
Though wouldn’t it mean
each fracturing took us

that much further
from heaven?
Not in this town,

not in June: harbor
and cloudbank, white houses’
endlessly broken planes,

a long argument
of lilac shadows and whites
as blue as noon:

phrasebooks of day,
articulated most of all
in these roses,

which mount and swell
in dynasties of bloom,
their easy idiom

a soundless compaction
of lip on lip. Their work,
these thick flowerheads?

Built to contain
sunlight, they interrupt
that movement just enough

to transfix in air, at eye level,
now: held still, and shattering,
which is the way with light:

the more you break it
the nearer it comes to whole.

Mark Doty






copyright mark doty
all rights reserved

search the clouds

Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon
Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon
We could float among the stars together, you and I

For we can fly we can fly....

Up, up and away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon
The world's a nicer place in my beautiful balloon
It wears a nicer face in my beautiful balloon
We can sing a song and sail along the silver sky

For we can fly we can fly....

Up, up and away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon
Suspended under a twilight canopy
We'll search the clouds for a star to guide us
If by some chance you find yourself loving me
We'll find a cloud to hide us
We'll keep the moon beside us

Love is waiting there in my beautiful balloon
Way up in the air in my beautiful balloon
If you'll hold my hand we'll chase your dream across the sky


For we can fly we can fly
Up, up and away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon
Balloon...
Up, up, and away.....