By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

by Elizabeth Smart

the event which too much anticipation has fingered to shreds.

The wild road winds round ledges manufactured from the mountains and cliffs. The Pacific in blue spasms reaches all its superlatives.

The long days seduce all thought away, and we lie like the lizards in the sun, postponing our lives indefinitely. But by the bathing pool, or on the sandhills of the beach, the Beginning lurks uncomfortably on the outskirts of the circle, like an unpopular person whom ignoring can keep away.

But he never passes anywhere near me without every drop of my blood springing to attention.

But that huge shadow is more than my only moon, more even than my destruction: it has the innocent slipping advent of the next generation, which enters in one night of joy, and leaves a meadowful of lamenting milkmaids when its purpose is grown to fruit.

I am far, far beyond that island of days where once, it seems, I watched a flower grow, and counted the steps of the sun, and fed, if my memory serves, the smiling animal at his appointed hour.

The typewriter is guilty with love and flowery with shame, and to me it speaks so loudly I fear it will communicate its indecency to casual visitors.

To deny love, and deceive it meanly by pretending that what is unconsummated remains eternal, or that love sublimated reaches highest to heavenly love, is repulsive, as the hypocrite’s face is repulsive when placed too near the truth.

in the end all that we can do is to sit at the table over which our hands cross, listening to tunes from the wurlitzer, with love huge and simple between us, and nothing more to be said.

The parchment philosopher has no traffic with the night, and no conception of the price of love. With smoky circles of thought he tries to combat the fog, and with anagrams to defeat anatomy.

There is no angle the world can assume which the love in my eye cannot make into a symbol of love.

There are no minor facts in life, there is only the one tremendous one.

I cannot hear beneath his subtle words the beginning of the world’s antagonism: the hatred of the mediocre for all miracles. All I want is for everyone to go away and leave me a thousand lives in which to muse, only to muse, on this state of completion.

Parents’ imaginations build frameworks out of their own hopes and regrets into which children seldom grow, but instead, contrary as trees, lean sideways out of the architecture, blown by a fatal wind their parents never envisaged.

I do not accept it sadly or ruefully or wistfully or in despair. I accept it without tomorrows and without any lilies of promise. It is the enough, the now, and though it comes without anything, it gives me everything.

This state is far from longing because it is far beyond it. It is the state where the unbearable suffers eclipse and becomes coma.

Who were the female saints, I say, and how did they manage to fill their beds with God? How can any woman from this empty world construct communication with heaven?

am lonely. I cannot be a female saint. I want the one I want. He is the one I picked out from the world.

But relentless Spring goes on and dares to finish itself without him, and I grow from one shape into another,

Sleep tries to seduce me by promising a more reasonable tomorrow. But I will not be betrayed by such a Judas of fallacy: it betrays everyone: it leads them into death. Everyone acquiesces: everyone compromises.

My lover lies under the lindens-tree kissing Tomorrow with his mouth that was all mine. O the tumult, the unavailing ineffectual uproar of the damned.