From: twain@milton.u.washington.edu (Barbara Hlavin)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Reading as an addiction (Was: 92 in rabreview)
Date: 2 Jan 1993 21:35:14 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
NNTP-Posting-Host: milton.u.washington.edu

In article <1993Jan2.202159.24629@maths.tcd.ie> pmoloney@maths.tcd.ie 
(Paul Moloney) writes:
>
>There was once a girl I know whose place I went to after a party.
>We'd been friends for a while, and I wondered would, or could,
>our relationship go any further. One look at her bedroom, which contained
>no books apart from one of the tackiest holiday romances I'd ever
>seen (it had a photo instead of artwork on the cover), disassuaded
>me of this notion.
>
No pedagogic instincts, I see. 

Celebrating the new year by cleaning the bedroom, I have just 
removed from under the edge of the bed the following books: 
_A River Runs Through It_, Norman Maclean; _The Rituals 
of Dinner_, Margaret Visser; _Everything Tastes Better Outdoors_, 
Claudia Roden; and _Moon Crossing Bridge_, Tess Gallagher's first 
collection of poetry since Raymond Carver died. 
: 

What, I wonder, would a potential beau make of this?  (And what 
would he be doing burrowing under my bed, anyway?)  Perhaps he 
would start to plan a fishing trip, and a week's worth of 
menus.  We could sit under the moon and read this poem: 

Crazy Menu 

Last of his toothpaste, last of his Wheat Chex, last 
of his 5-Quick-Cinnamon-Rolls-With-Icing, his
Pop Secret Microwave Pop-
corn, his Deluxe Fudge Brownie Mix next to my 
Casbah Nutted Pilaf on the sparser 
shelf.  I'm using it all up.  Chanting: he'd-want-me- 
to-he'd-want-me-to. To consume loss like a hydra-headed 
meal of would-have-dones accompanied by 
missed-shared-delight.  What can I tell you?
I'm a lost proof. 
But something eats with me, a darling of 
the air-that-is.  It smacks its unkissable lips and 
pours me down with a gleam in its unblinkable eye, me-- 
the genius loci of his waiting room to this feast of rapidly 
congealing unobtainables.  Oh-me-of- 
the last-of-his-lastness through which I am gigantically 
left over like the delight of Turkish 

Delight.  Don't haul out your memory vault to 
cauterize my green-with-moment-thumb.  Or shove me 
into the gloom-closet of yet another cannibalistic 
*Nevermore*.  I've been there.  And there too.  It was not 
unusual--that bravado of a castrato in a brothel 
yanking his nose and waxing paradisal.  No, I'm more like 
a Polish miner who meets a Chinese miner at a 
helmet convention in Amsterdam.  Because we both 
speak a brand of Philip Morris English picked up 
from a now extinct murmur heard only impromptu 
at a certain caved-in depth, we are overwhelmed by 
the sheer fact of meeting and we clasp 
each other by our bare heads for nights, exchanging 
the unimpoverishable secrets of the earth, the going down and 
the coming up, the immutable pretext of light, a common history 
of slumped canaries, of bereaved kinfolk, of black-lunged 
singers and handmade coffins.  We trade 
a few eulogies and drinking songs and sit down at last to 
a huge meal of aged cheese and kippers. 
We lean into our vitals 

with all the lights off.  It's dark inside and out. 
This is our last chance to revel in the unencumbered 
flickering of Balinese tapers we bought at 
a souvenir stand above the canal.  Like rice and spit 
we are tolerant of all occasions, this being 
the lifting of the dread whereby 
the girls' wings we autograph onto our duffle coats 
have been painted like butterflies, only 
on the upside so the dark is mocked by 
our raised arms, our fluttered concentration, uncollectable as 
the lastness I am of him I love-ed 
scribbled unsentimentally on a valentine in 1983: 
	*To the King of my Heart!* 
In daylight we pick up our tinned rations and hike off, 
every artery and nerve of us, into the rest 
of our commemorative lives. 


--Barbara