[699] Incident

Guest poem submitted by Amulya Gopalakrishnan, <amulya_g@>:

I look across the table and think
(fiery with love)
Ask me, go on, ask me
to do something impossible,
something freakishly useless,
something unimaginable and inimitable

Like making a finger break into blossom
or walking for half an hour in twenty minutes
or remembering tomorrow.

I will you to ask it.
But all you say is
Will you give me a cigarette?
And I smile and,
returning to the marvelous world
of possibility
I give you one
with a hand that trembles
with a human trembling.

     -- Norman MacCaig

Find me a guy who thinks like that, the madness and the wry tenderness...
realizing the awful depth of his love, the contrast between that glorious
pitch of passion and our unmagical surroundings. Reminds me of Yeats in
Adam's Curse( yearning to love her in 'the old high way of love'). I love
the touches like 'marvellous world of possibility'... discovering the
romance of the real. What's absolutely wonderful about MacCaig is the way he
always, always brings out the underworld of dreaming, of the fantasy
billowing beneath the even surface of the everyday.

Amulya.

From: James Dowell <James.Dowell@>

im sitting here at work, already clocked out, looking at email.  and i see
another poem here for the 16th.  something ive never read before and the
authors name is meaningless to me.

and i read and read.  exactly too marvelous for words.

the words crack open a little window inside me,  like im longing to breathe
again,  to feel life not this other thing that so often seems to take its
place, and for a moment-  and its really just a moment-  everything is new
again,  everything is alright.  love is just a glance away...

thanks.