I remember it was late spring at the small college by the lake. The flowering trees were suddenly little factories of joys we hadn’t remembered to ask for. Winter does that. It takes away parts of one’s hope though it does it so slowly you’ll never sense your individual losses. I was walking in the twilight with two splendid friends, both of them were poets and the tiny fingers of night were pushing each of us along as if reminding us we’d been asleep and should make up for it. In turn we were trading bits of poetry. “Do you remember this one,” I asked. “Its by Antonio Machado: ‘Music! A naked woman runs mad through the pure night!'”
One of my friends (who I’ll call Joseph) said: “The men in the white coats chase naked music disguised as a madwoman through the night.” “Boy, poetry can lose its flavor pretty quickly.”
My other friend (who I’ll call Henry) said: “The men in the white coats are stunned by the naked music and forget the ascendant madwoman who becomes a laurel tree.”
“Oh,” I said, “If madwomen live inside trees then I say they don’t live in the laurel, they live in the locust.”
We were happy and walking to the home of friends where we would have a fine dinner and more than a little wine and where we would talk about anything at all. The anticipatory pleasure of free talk–real talk, the talk that arises from mutual happiness , that’s as lovely as the trees and the nearly full moon and the first instance of spring dusk when the day’s heat doesn’t vanish but lingers the way our bodies secretly hope it will. We are all farmers who long to stand at the edge of a field, end of day, hands in our pockets.
(Excerpt from “Times of Joy: the Art of Conversation” by S.K.)
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
If I read this post right, you have a new book coming out. Tell us more! — Georgia
LikeLike