When you set out on the voyage to Ithaca,
pray that your journey may be long,
full of adventures, full of knowledge.
Of the Laestrygones and the Cyclopes,
and of furious Poseidon, do not be afraid,
for such on your journey you shall never meet
if your thought remain lofty, if a select
emotion imbue your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygones and the Cyclopes
and furious Poseidon you will never meet
unless you drag them with you in your soul,
unless your soul raises them up before you.

Pray that your journey may be long,
that many may those summer mornings be
when with what pleasure, what untold delight
you enter harbors you’ve not seen before;
that you stop at Phoenician market places
to procure the goodly merchandise,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and voluptuous perfumes of every kind,
as lavish an amount of voluptuous perfumes as you can;
that you venture on to many Egyptian cities
to learn and yet again to learn from the sages.

But you must always keep Ithaca in mind.
The arrival there is your predestination.
Yet do not by any means hasten your voyage.
Let it best endure for many years,
until grown old at length you anchor at your island
rich with all you have acquired on the way.
You never hoped that Ithaca would give you riches.
Ithaca has given you the lovely voyage.
Without her you would not have ventured on the way.
She has nothing more to give you now.

Poor though you may find her, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Now that you have become so wise, so full of experience,
you will have understood the meaning of an Ithaca.

Yesterday sitting under a huge tree in a courtyard talking about our favorite poets, as one does, necks tilted back to release puffs of smoke into the blue sky filtering through the green leaves. When I was young I liked the confessional poets and I still will always hold room in my heart for them because I, too, was born doing reference work in sin. We drink iced coffee, the cream thick on the surface, and water with peeled and thinly sliced lemon wedges. Then I guess like everyone I went through a phase of liking the poems stripped bare, down to the picture, the wet black bough, and I like some of them even today. Inside the cafe there were small cakes made of peaches but they were too beautiful to eat and I didn't dare. I like the intellectual poems, the cool footnoted references. I love Millay because she took modern ideas and sliced and stretched until they fit perfectly into conventional molds, she took open relationships and put them into sonnets. I love Frank O'Hara because he looked all the way down into absolute isolation and despair and then skipped across it. Stein for being complex and making me think about language so hard; Hicok for being clever and making me forget about it entirely in the pureness of feeling. Mary Oliver's nature, Bukowski's secret heart. Words that are music. I love the way that when poetry is good, it takes a whole feeling or moment or image and tugs you right into its heart, pulls you into its rhythm until you feel it against you, the lines become words you have always known, the pulse of the poem is the pulse of your veins, and days or weeks later it returns to you, a phrase or a line, and you can't tell entirely if it's yours, because it feels like it is, it's so true. It's not always so good, but sometimes, or rarely, moments of beauty that sting like tears, when the poem is so lovely that no matter how hard the poet worked all you can see is the perfect result, you know what they know, what the poem itself knows: this would be impossible any other way. I love that I can sit in a cafe in the city center, smoking and drinking coffee and talking about what we love, loving poetry and talking about it for the third time this week. 

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French? 

     Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth. 

     Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change? 

     I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love. 

     Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves. 

     However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh. 

     My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has theiranxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep. 

     Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?) 

     St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse. 

     Destroy yourself, if you don’t know! 

     It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over. 

     “Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale. 

     I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.