The husband is now on a cleaning rampage through the house yet again. I feel guilty because I've only folded a few sweaters and he's going at it fullstop. I hate cleaning.
He drives me crazy sometimes, but I love him.
Right after I met him and we decided we were hopelessly in love and I came up from Barcelona to see him and visit Stockholm for the first time, I bought him an antique netsuke - one of those elaborately carved Japanese buttons, this particular one had two old men standing arm in arm. And I wrote a poem to go with it.
The netsuke and the poem still sit on the nightstand next to his side of the bed. And it's all clean now, after his cleaning rampage.
- Netsuke
Once on a time
men lived lives so uncontainable,
they were immortalized
after a fashion:
sent to the skies
by some jealous god or another,
as if it were an honor;
Pollux and Castor,
say, side by side,
burning up for each other,
but the black space between them impassable,
so unbearably cold,
so impossibly wide.
You and I, well,
we are at least
as deserving of immortality.
But I would choose
nothing like a star.
No, we should be something
intimate, domestic, graspable;
something to be held
in the palm of the hand.
After all, we are
quite containable.
A button?
Yes, we could be a button
of the Japanese sort,
a netsuke, you and me,
two old men carved
from the same piece of tiny ivory,
the dye almost rubbed
from all but our smiles.
Take it, my love,
this button,
warm it in the palm of your hand.
We are hardly immortal,
you and me.
But this button,
we can aspire to be the smiling,
bald, thick, flower-bedecked
old men who hold one another
forever,
on this button.
Aren't the first throes of love heroic?
I know I should be embarrassed to show anyone this poem. But I'm secretly rather proud of it.
The Swedish phrase for the day is min stora kärlek. It means my true love.
- by Francis S.
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