A favorite.

Before I left graduate school, a beautiful dear friend named Kim made a gift for me. I can't seem to get a good picture of it, so I'll do what I can to describe it to you.



She's very artistic; was, at least, and I hope to God she still is around to be so creative. It's sad, at this age, that when I haven't heard from someone in so many years, that I fear they're gone. I think of the last time I heard from her, telling me how she had dressed and posed old mannequins in her front window so that people wouldn't know she was out - and would think, instead, that she was having a party with beautiful, achingly desirable people filling her living room.



One year - I can't remember anymore if it was Christmas, or a birthday, although it doesn't really matter now - she made me a beautiful wooden box, small, like you'd have on top of your dresser for watches or foreign coins or tiny things that you didn't know what to do with but knew you didn't wanted to lose and wanted to be able to pull out and look at and sigh when you thought of where they came from. It's painted blue, and antiqued with bronze, and looks like something you've had all your life, that your parents and maybe even their parents had, that no matter how hard you try you can't ever quite get the dust completely off of it but it doesn't matter because that's how you want to remember it.



The two most treasured components - besides her having made it for me - were the painting by Picasso, and the poem by e.e. cummings:

stand with your lover on the ending earth -

and while a (huge which by huger than

huge) whoing sea leaps to greenly hurl snow

suppose we could not love, dear; imagine

ourselves like living neither nor dead these

(or many thousand hearts which don't and dream

or many million minds which sleep and move)

blind sands, at pitiless the mercy of

time time time time time

- how fortunate are you and i, whose home

is timelessness: we who have wandered down

from fragrant mountains of eternal now

to frolic in such mysteries as birth

and death a day (or maybe even less)