I read a review in the New Yorker about a book of poems entitled Night by Etel Adnan.  The next day I submitted my order to Amazon.

For many years I have carried a copy of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in my briefcase where ever i go.  Adnan’s work will join the Eliot poems in my briefcase.

The wish to inhabit storms leads to cities in flames.  Traces turn into signs and thinking precedes itself in the deep recesses of the brain.  Bodies are always naked under their clothes.

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Not to be able to climb up a mountain, run from this place to the next, see things improving for friends or nations, or even desire a clear day, not to stop the torture….

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Today is a beautiful day.  The gods are drunk, and the girls staggering with exhaustion.  It’s time to gather the poppies spread around, wave to the boats born so happy.

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The first assertion strikes me as a indictment of the present occupant of the White House.  The inevitable end of threats and bluster is conflagration.    Adnan then touches on the primal beginnings of thought, the trace residue of experience deposited, the substrate of conscious awareness.  And are we not all standard-issue-human beings? Always naked under the clothes.

There is much that one is unable to do.   The list grows longer with the passage of time.  The majority of those living in flood-wrecked Dallas cannot just leave, become refugees and settle some place else.  The final entry on her short list is a lightening strike:  not to stop the torture.

Occasionally life is ineffably delicious.  One can only savor the shear joy of being here, now.  “The gods are drunk…”  These lines reminded me of a few weeks ago when I stood with Laura by the harbor channel at St. Joseph Michigan.  We waved at the passengers on the pleasure boats that passed before us coming and going into the lake.  They waved back.  Exchanging a wave was so natural.  It felt as if we were all born happy.

For background info on Etel Adnan