hannah hates when i do this, which is precisely why i'm forging on...

mostly, our phone conversations go something like this:

hannah calls, singing: in a big country dreams stay with you. like a lover's voice...

me: what is that. what are you doing.

hannah (yelling): "in a big country!" by big country! best 80's song ever!

me: i love anderson cooper.

hannah (sigh): i love anderson cooper.

me: i want to be porochista khakpour (novelist, sons and other flammable objects).

hannah (who's misunderstood): five hundred sheep in darfur? what does that mean?

me: no no no. the novelist.

hannah: no one would speak to you with a name like that.

me: everyone speaks to her.

seriously, that bad. sometimes, though, we read to each other. which is when the earnest, bleeding heart writer comes out in us both.

so, i thought i'd post the louise gluck poem we both love...and will preface only by saying:

once, in grad school, a very dear professor said to me, "i wish only you'd think in more conceptual terms." i only now realize he meant, "i only wish at times you were smarter." we had been reading "hard books," and i had been churning out "simple" work. the work of a storyteller.

but that's the thing with gluck--her brilliance, her strange clairvoyance, it's all tempered by such a frank voice. love her. love her. and so, one of the poems we read aloud:

the destination

we had only a few days, but they were very long,
the light changed constantly.
a few days, spread out over several years,
over the course of a decade.

and each meeting charged with a sense of exactness,
as though we had traveled, separately,
some great distance; as though there had been,
through all the years of wandering,
a destination, after all.
not a place, but a body, a voice.

a few days. intensity
that was never permitted to develop
into tolerance or sluggish affection.

and i believed for many years this was a great marvel;
in my mind, i returned to those days repeatedly,
convinced they were the center of my amorous life.

the days were very long, like the days now.
and the intervals, the separations, exalted,
suffused with a kind of passionate joy that seemed, somehow,
to extend those days, to be inseparable from them.
so that a few hours could take up a lifetime.

a few hours, a world that neither unfolded nor diminished,
that could, at any point, be entered again--

so that long after the end i could return to it without difficulty,
i could live almost completely in imagination.