CHOOSE LIFE

Choose life instead of those prisms with no depth even if their colors

     are purer

Instead of this hour always hidden instead of these terrible vehicles

     of cold flame

Instead of these overripe stones

Choose this heart with its safety catch

Instead of that murmuring pool

And that white fabric singing in the air and the earth at the same time

Instead of that marriage blessing joining my forehead to total vanity’s

                     Choose life

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They speak about ringing changes, especially at the New Year, and I like that.

No one should or will be subjected to and bored by My New Year’s Resolutions.  Ever again. It’s high time, past time, to execute against plan.

This recalls last week’s life changing event.  We were at the Tuxedo Club trying to use up our unexpended quarterly minimum at the Friday evening Shore Dinner.  The new assistant manager, so ashen-faced I thought a personal tragedy must have befallen him, told us that the kitchen was unexpectedly a lobster short because one of the captive living creatures had died of natural causes just before they could kill him for us to eat.  That was finally and fully IT.  As the great poet said:

                      Choose life.

 

Ollie Halsall: Airplane Food (Link)

Poem excerpt:  André Breton, Choose Life, 1923, from Clair de Terre (tr. Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow).

Eric Gill:  Three Martlets, wood engraving, 1914, showing St. Thomas à Becket's coat of arms and the inscription "Do not cease, Thomas, to protect us."

Pilgrim badge (bell) associated with St. Thomas à Becket and Canterbury, British Museum, London.

Ollie Halsall: Steppin' Out (Link)

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