Thursday, August 7, 2008

Dylan's Letters

O, my. I just received my copy of Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters. I read the front, inside jacket, and I'm setting it aside...now...before it goes too far. Either it's the force of Dylan's genius or my flimsy constitution, but I'm not sturdy enough to read these letters, maybe when I'm older. On the other hand, I find myself not one whit less manic than thirty years ago. Emotions at which I scoffed as trivial, I now labor under as profound. I may weep and laugh myself, progressively, into death.

"She was watching CSI, burst into tears," Mr. Rivergarth will explain to the coroner, "then she was gone. I suspected something was wrong when she laughed at the rolling head, but it wasn't all that unusual; I once found her swooning with love over a tomato. She was especially gleeful over semicolons."

"Remember me?" Dylan Thomas wrote to a friend in Indiana. "Round, red, robustly raddled, a bulging Apple among poets. Hard as nails made of cream cheese, gap-toothed, balding, noisome, a great collector of dust and a magnet for moths, mad for beer, frightened of priests, women, Chicago, writers, distance, time, children, geese, death, in love, frightened of love."

No, I'll set this aside for a few days and see how it goes. Definitely not ready to be intimate with Dylan. Definitely not.

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