A Poet's Alphabet Mark Strand A is for absence. It is sometimes - but not always - nice to think that other people may be talking about you when you are not present, that you are the subject of a conversation you have not steered in your direction and whose evolution depends on your absence. This is what happends to the famous. And to the dead. They can be the life of the party and never show up. For those neither famous nor dead, at the bottom of their yearning to be absent is the hope that they will be missed. Being missed suggests being loved. True, not to be the active or living recipient of what one craves may seem a sorry fate. But it takes no effort. Hang around and you interfere with the love that could be yours; die and you clear a space for yourself. B is for before, the acknowledged antecedent of now, the innocent shape of earlier, the vague and beautiful cousin of "when," the tragic mother of "will become," the suicide of "too late." C is for Canada, the country of my birth, of my earliest memories, where my parents lived out their last years, where they are buried. It was the backdrop to their sorrow and was so big, so empty, that every day they lived there, they could count on being lost. <To be continued.....^^> -- ☆╭╮ ╭╮■ ∫╰╰﹏╯╯■ Sometimes... ﹡︱ ︱■ ﹡╭˙。˙╮■ the goodness descends ＊╰ ﹍﹎ ╯■ without a name. --

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