The Prince of Tides
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Read between March 10 - April 19, 2022
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I am a patriot of a singular geography on the planet; I speak of my country religiously; I am proud of its landscape. I walk through the traffic of cities cautiously, always nimble and on the alert, because my heart belongs in the marshlands.
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They had come from the sea mysteriously, gloriously, and we three children spoke to them, mammals to mammals, in the stunned, grieving canticles of children unfamiliar with willful death.
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But there is no magic to nightmares.
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It’s an act of will to have a memory or not, and I chose not to have one. Because I needed to love my mother and father in all their flawed, outrageous humanity, I could not afford to address them directly about the felonies committed against all of us. I could not hold them accountable or indict them for crimes they could not help. They, too, had a history—one that I remembered with both tenderness and pain, one that made me forgive their transgressions against their own children. In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.
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“What was your family life like, Savannah?” I asked, pretending I was conducting an interview. “Hiroshima,” she whispered. “And what has life been like since you left the warm, abiding bosom of your nurturing, close-knit family?” “Nagasaki,” she said, a bitter smile on her face. “You’re a poet, Savannah,” I said, watching her. “Compare your family to a ship.” “The Titanic.” “Name the poem, Savannah, you wrote in honor of your family.” “ ‘The History of Auschwitz.’ ” And we both laughed.
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You could believe in the birth of goddesses by watching the wind catch their hair and their small brown hands make sweet simultaneous gestures to brush the hair out of their eyes as their laughter broke with the surf.
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I have always loved my sister’s voice. It is clear and light, a voice without seasons, like bells over a green city or snowfall on the roots of orchids. Her voice is a greening thing, an enemy of storm and dark and winter. She pronounced each word carefully, as though she was tasting fruit. The words of her poems were a most private and fragrant orchard.
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I blaze with a deep sullen magic, smell lust like a heron on fire; all words I form into castles then storm them with soldiers of air. What I seek is not there for asking. My armies are fit and well trained. This poet will trust her battalions to fashion her words into blades. At dawn I shall ask them for beauty, for proof that their training went well. At night I shall beg their forgiveness as I cut their throats by the hill. My navies advance through the language, destroyers ablaze in high seas. I soften the island for landings. With words, I enlist a dark army. My poems are my war with the ...more
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Because of some endemic flaw in my manhood I could not just have wives or lovers. I required soft enemies humming lullabies of carnage in the playroom, snipers in floral print dresses gunning for me from the bell towers.
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Love has no weapons; it has no fists. Love does not bruise, nor does it draw blood.
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If your parents disapprove of you and are cunning with their disapproval, there will never come a new dawn when you can become convinced of your own value. There is no fixing a damaged childhood. The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float.
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I wondered how I would come to love a woman, and with both pleasure and terror, I would think that somewhere in the world there was some laughing, singing girl who would one day become my wife. In my mind, I could see her dancing and playing and flirting in preparation for that day of awe and wonder when we would meet and in mutual ecstasy declare, “I shall live with you forever.” How much of my father would I bring to that singing girl’s life? How much of my mother? And how many days would it take before I, Tom Wingo, child of storm, would silence her laughter and song for all time? How long ...more
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I would like to have seen the world with eyes incapable of anything but wonder, and with a tongue fluent only in praise.