A beautiful song that’s the theme song for Once, a low budget film about an Irish street musician who crossed path in Dublin with a Czech immigrant (who plays the piano & sings). They eventually go separate ways (having two separate lives) but they shared something beautiful when a broken vacuum cleaner & music brought them together. Poignant stuff.
Yea, I wanted a love song, since the theme for RWP yesterday is love dressed in metaphors. So l.o.v.e., here’s a song for you, in all your wonderful guises and heartbrokenness.
Lyrics:
I don’t know you
But I want you
All the more for that
Words fall through me
And always fool me
And I can’t react
And games that never amount
To more than they’re meant
Will play themselves out
Take this sinking boat and point it home
We’ve still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you have a choice
You’ll make it now
Falling slowly, eyes that know me
And I can’t go back
Moods that take me and erase me
And I’m painted black
You have suffered enough
And warred with yourself
It’s time that you won
Take this sinking boat and point it home
We’ve still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you had a choice
You’ve made it now
Falling slowly sing your melody
I’ll sing along
This post was inspired by the movie showing on my TV screen tonight.
I can’t think of a love scene more beautiful than the flying scene in James Cameron’s Titanic (1997). Truly. Can you? I can’t.
Mad accidental love that’s chaotic, disheveled, unexpected, so giddy. Like a fatal wound.
True love.
Jewish translator: Father informs me you’re writing a book about this trip. You’re a writer?
American Jew: No.
Jewish translator: Then what is this?
American Jew: It’s a catalog.
Jewish translator: Catalog. Catalog.
American Jew: I don’t know why they told you that. I’m not a writer. I mean, I write, but I’m more of a… collector, really.
Jewish translator: And what do you collect?
American Jew: Things. Family things.
Jewish translator: It is a good career, yes?
American Jew: No, it’s not a career, It’s just something I do.
Jewish translator: Why?
American Jew: I don’t know. Why does anybody do anything?
It’s just something to do.
(Jewish translator actually speaks Russian.)
Excerpt from a film adaptation (Liev Schreiber’s 2005 directorial debut) of Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel, Everything is illuminated (2002).
You can watch the excerpt here. I leave the soundtrack, Inside out, at the bottom of this post if you wish to listen.
I.
Maybe there’s a story in this,
a seeing eye bitch, for a man
proclaiming blindness, feigned
really, for protection of kind,
coming into retirement, settled
in a household slightly deranged.
Till a curve on the road brought
a stranger, a collector of family
things, digging into his Jewish
roots. Questions: where is this place,
who is the girl in the photograph
who saved the life of grandfather?
2.
What has that story got to do with
Timmy, a boy whose mother carried
to lay on a two-seater couch? Turn
him, so he could watch the TV, our guest
suggested, kindly. He can’t see, said
his mother. He turned his head slightly
anyway, as if angled to face the TV.
I remembered carrying my son till he
became overgrown, two sacks of rice
heavy. Born first, Timmy, his cousin, drank
like sucking marrow, his mother balancing
the bottle. He’s my sacrament. Look at him.
3.
Living hand to mouth, your mother in a
heroic apron feeding a house of children,
saving last measly crumbs for herself.
Precluding a deep recession, an uncle,
third son sudden in mid-life, tripled his
last income, the swanky job putting a
swagger to spirits long in despair. Emerging
from her room, a bookish cousin my son’s age,
spectacles perched, spoke at last, of what
she thinks she would like to study. Literature,
like her mother did. Like me, I said, delighted.
Grace, every last drop, in unexpected places.
4.
The red roses bought for Christmas showed
signs of wilting. The large pots for victuals
for the occasion washed, ready to be stowed,
leaving no trace soon. Stories repeated like
a motif, graffiti typed like braille, for the blind
to feel. American poet Adrienne Rich wrote, Quantify suffering, you could rule the world.
I cannot exceed her irony, but I’m a collector,
too, of stories written on floorboards, on walls,
discarded debris, piled in corners and along
the skirtings, a hinged thing lost to its original
function, deciphering the scrawls like morse code.
5.
A phone call. A dear friend’s wife, post stroke,
now speaks lucidly, even if her brain is still
retrieving, data lost, so she walks into walls.
All needs reprogramming. Reflexes unflexed.
Ordinary things we’re stone-blind to, our
fascist brain stalking legs. Stop, wall.
Every chalk ash face, ankles caked with
dried blood. Every damn still functioning body
part we cannot see, working till execution.
Me, I’m just the officious seeing eye bitch,
following in your footsteps, quelling
your loneliness, flying till I hit the wall.
6.
Everything turned inside out, in a hospital bed,
turning away soup and potatoes, done with
hunger, nothing else to do, may our mind, or
our body, which is which, arching backwards,
complete the circle, a handful of stones, covered
in night, straws of memory, the past slipping,
tripping into something, or anything, who knows,
through the mind’s eye, see lighted windows,
in a final sunburst, this must be the place to be,
there and then, as we slow to a crawl, as we face
our backs to the wall, waiting to expire, blood
bursting vessels, (gone except for collectors),
everything will be nothing but illuminated.
Notes: Reference is made to Adrienne Rich’s Hunger.
For every poem written in response to this prompt, the Read Write Poem directors will donate one food item (or its cash equivalent, up to a total of $150) to Hopelink, an organization that supports the homeless, low-income families, the elderly and people with disabilities in the Seattle area. Read here.
