In the Name of Doris, Stop

When you're seventeen, and drunk
on the husky, late-night flavor
of your first girlfriend's voice
along the wires of the telephone

what else to do but steal
your father's El Dorado from the drive,
and cruise out to the park on Driscoll Hill?
Then climb the county water tower

and aerosol her name in spraycan orange
a hundred feet above the town?
Because only the letters of that word,
DORIS, next door to yours,

in yard-high, iridescent script,
are amplified enough to tell the world
who's playing lead guitar
in the rock band of your blood.

You don't consider for a moment
the shock in store for you in 10 A.D.,
a decade after Doris, when,
out for a drive on your visit home,

you take the Smallville Road, look up
and see RON LOVES DORIS
still scorched upon the reservoir.
This is how history catches up—

by holding still until you
bump into yourself.
What makes you blush, and shove
the pedal of the Mustang

almost through the floor
as if you wanted to spray gravel
across the features of the past,
or accelerate into oblivion?

Are you so out of love that you
can't move fast enough away?
But if desire is acceleration,
experience is circular as any

Indianapolis. We keep coming back
to what we are—each time older,
more freaked out, or less afraid.
And you are older now.

You should stop today.
In the name of Doris, stop.

- "History of Desire" by Tony Hoagland, from Sweet Ruin

Worth Sharing

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

- Jane Austen from Pride & Prejudice, Chapter I of Volume I (Chap. 1)

Be a Moon

If you would not be rain my darling, then be a tree,

Content in its bounty. Be a tree.

And if you would not be a tree my darling, then be a stone,

Content in its dampness. Be a stone.

And if you would not be a stone my darling, then be a moon,

In the slumber of the beloved, be a moon.

This is how a woman spoke to her son, at his funeral.

-Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

Original Arabic:


إذا لم تكن مطرا يا حبيبي ...فكن شجرا مشبعا بالخصوبة...كن شجرا...


وإذا لم تكن شجرا يا حبيبي...فكن حجرا مشبعا بالرطوبة...كن حجرا


وإذا لم تكن حجرا يا حبيبي ...فكن قمرا في منام الحبيبة ...كن قمرا


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