Between Us

We are not ene­mies, but friends. We must not be ene­mies. Though pas­sion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affec­tion. The mys­tic chords of mem­ory, stretch­ing from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every liv­ing heart and hearth­stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the cho­rus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the bet­ter angels of our nature.

Lin­coln

A friend asked me to walk, and

to look again at the scrim of our var­i­ous vocabularies,

and talk between our veils. We walk, and are like two East­ern women

scur­ry­ing along, muf­fled, wor­ry­ing. But, in good faith,

we are try­ing: the codes of World War II, the orig­i­nal texts, the Gaelic, the

amaz­ing Eng­lish, the Latin and Greek of our shared work – time­less and use­less for

this con­ver­sa­tion, we use them all. As long as we are talk­ing, we are like a vapor; we are

the words rubbed from the school boy’s paper,

diverg­ing like the two paths in the woods, like a mil­lion paths blown like smoke

on the wind of a chaff-burned field. There is maybe not a path long enough for our lines

of words to reach our lin­gua franca, and this in spite of our mutual affec­tion for them all,

the words.

But the walking…is good. It is enough. It is born in com­pan­ion­ship, for­give­ness, it is a

long time com­ing and its cho­rus, silent and unwa­ver­ing, runs like a river between

our paths, a river whose name is only…love.

for Les/D