David Given Schwarm

“Somewhere beyond Bill’s shack an afterwork radio had begun singing of folly and fate, and there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already…

       Alas! that all we lov’d of him should be,       But for our grief, as if it had not been,       And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me!       Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene       The actors or spectators? Great and mean       Meet mass’d in death, who lends what life must borrow.      …

“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”

       Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean       A quickening life from the Earth’s heart has burst       As it has ever done, with change and motion,       From the great morning of the world when first       God dawn’d on Chaos; in its stream immers’d,       The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light;      …

       Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone,       But grief returns with the revolving year;       The airs and streams renew their joyous tone;       The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear;       Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons’ bier;       The amorous birds now pair in every brake,       And build their mossy homes in…

      Thy spirit’s sister, the lorn nightingale       Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain;       Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale       Heaven, and could nourish in the sun’s domain       Her mighty youth with morning, doth complain,       Soaring and screaming round her empty nest,       As Albion wails for thee: the curse of Cain       Light…

I remember thinking that this idea of children-colors had been lifted by authors Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom from a passage in James Joyce, and that two of the colors were quite exasperatingly lovely—Orange who kept fidgeting all the time, and Emerald who, when her eyes got used to the pitch-black pit where we all…

And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy