“My time will come,” you say to yourself, but how can you know whether or not your time has not already come and gone? Perhaps one afternoon on the veranda in Panama, with the Barbadians whetting their sickles on the hill below, the Chinese garden green, the noise of the breakers from beyond the hill, the crochet in your lap, and the cool room shuttered and the sheeted bed, perhaps that was your time. (But it was too early.) Or mornings in the sunny room in Boston, when the children cried loudly from the public school across the way, “A prairie is a grassy plain,” and you sat on the low couch with your books and papers about you, happy and safe and calm: perhaps your time was then. (But you didn’t see it at all.) Perhaps it has been spent, all spent, squandered out, in taking of streetcars, drinking gin, smoking cigarettes—in connubial love, in thousands of books devoured by the eye, in eating, sewing, in suspicions, tears, jealousy, hatred and fear. Perhaps it is now, on a dark day in October, where you sit with emptiness in your body and heart; beside the small fire, drying your hair—older, more tired, desperately silent, unhappily alone, with faith and daydreams (perhaps luckily) broken and disappearing with the dreadful pain in your shoulder which presages dissolution, infection and age. Perhaps this very instant is your time—pretty late—but still your own, your peculiar, your promised and presaged moment, out of all moments forever. —Louise Bogan
Posted on: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 14:31:40 +0000
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