Great Paragraphs

Sort of a composite paragraph from Holly Millea's piece on Michelle Williams in the current (April) issue of ELLE magazine. Heartbreaking, poignant, sincere--unbelievable. If I could publish the whole article, I would.


This reminds her [Michelle Williams] of a favorite poem she discovered, "when I was, like, really skimming the bottom. I was in this hotel and I reached over into the bedside table for, I don't know what--a phone book, some matches, the Bible, something--and inside it was an old copy of The Paris Review. And the first poem was by this guy named Galway Kinnell. And I read it and I felt safe and understood by the world for the first time." So much so that she's become a Galway groupie, attending his readings. She even wrote him a letter. "There's this one poem called 'Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight.' It's about being a parent--I loved it even before I had a kid--and the last lines are:

When I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among
the ten thousand thing,
each scratched in time with such knowledge,
the wages
of dying is love.

"For a long time the last line utterly mystified me. The wages of dying is love? Like, the price of dying is love? The cost? No. For dying you're paid in love. Because you have to die, you get to experience love. Finally decoded!" She sighs. "You're going to die when you read this poem. He places so much esteem and knowledge in the face and the body of the newborn.

....

In New York, less than an hour later, the news broke. And after a week of grieving silence, she released a statement to the world, which read, in part, "My heart is broken. I am the mother of the most tender-hearted, high-spirited, beautiful little girl who is the spitting image of her father. All that I cling to is his presence inside her that reveals itself every day." How old must she feel now?

Williams has told us how Galways Kinnell's poem ends. Here's how it begins:

You scream, waking from a nightmare.
When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.


Love.
Seth