[Video: Linda Ronstadt sings “Blue Bayou,” in a performance filmed in September, 1977.
(Lyrics here.)]
From whiskey river:
Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.
(Rebecca Solnit [source])
…and (italicized portion):
New Year’s Day
The rain this morning falls
on the last of the snowand will wash it away. I can smell
the grass again, and the torn leavesbeing eased down into the mud.
The few loves I’ve been allowedto keep are still sleeping
on the West Coast. Here in VirginiaI walk across the fields with only
a few young cows for company.Big-boned and shy,
they are like girls I rememberfrom junior high, who never
spoke, who kept their headslowered and their arms crossed against
their new breasts. Those girlsare nearly forty now. Like me,
they must sometimes standat a window late at night, looking out
on a silent backyard, at onerusting lawn chair and the sheer walls
of other people’s houses.They must lie down some afternoons
and cry hard for whoever usedto make them happiest,
and wonder how their liveshave carried them
this far without ever onceexplaining anything. I don’t know
why I’m walking out herewith my coat darkening
and my boots sinking in, coming upwith a mild sucking sound
I like to hear. I don’t carewhere those girls are now.
Whatever they’ve made of itthey can have. Today I want
to resolve nothing.I only want to walk
a little longer in the coldblessing of the rain,
and lift my face to it.
(Kim Addonizio [source])
