Devotion

by Patti Smith

Why does the creative spirit turn on itself?

occurs to me that the young look beautiful as they sleep and the old, such as myself, look dead.

Most often the alchemy that produces a poem or a work of fiction is hidden within the work itself, if not embedded in the coiling ridges of the mind. But

Her mind was a muscle of discontent.

Twirling about giddily, she experienced the melancholy

luxury of solitary joy.

Her defining sense of self was completely entwined with the laces of her skates.

Privately tutored, he excelled in languages, and was socially impeccable, yet internally restless, consumed by the desire to tear things apart and rearrange according to his own design. He found solace in the poet Rimbaud, who did so with words.

Some things melt before they become memories.

Theirs was a story that could not resolve, only unravel.

A story with the intrinsic power of myth. One that turned in on itself, leaving only a transparency, their bed an acrid cloud, on which they brutally coupled, then floated. When does it cease to be something beautiful, a faithful aspect of the heart, to become off-center, slightly off the axis, and then hurled into an obsessional

v...

The impossible reigned in the poem of her mind. To do what no other had done, to reinvent space, to produce tears. 8

She possessed not the glow of love but the face of a ravaged bird.

She did not need to read, as she knew every word by heart. But her eyes fell on his last words. The letter slipped from her hands. She did not reach to pick it up. The qualities that will help you get through life you have received from me.

The qualities that will make you welcomed in heaven from your mother.

Instead she chose to tell her story in the greater church, the green cathedral that is nature. For nature too is holy, more holy than the icons, more holy then the relics of saints. These were dead things compared to the most insignificant living thing. The fox knows

this, and the deer, and the pine.