Love…in words

Let the olives reign

by Neil Waldman

Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf

So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this — But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it. However I won’t bore you with any more.
We have re-started, and the train is shaky again. I shall have to write at the stations — which are fortunately many across the Lombard plain. …The waterfalls in Switzerland were frozen into solid iridescent curtains of ice, hanging over the rock; so lovely. And Italy all blanketed in snow.
We’re going to start again. I shall have to wait till Trieste tomorrow morning. Please forgive me for writing such a miserable letter.”
The following January—a year later—Vita wrote to Virginia:
“My darling, I hoped I should wake up less depressed this morning, but I didn’t. I went to bed last night as black as a sweep. The awful dreariness of Westphalia makes it worse: factory towns, mounds of slag, flat country, and some patches of dirty snow. … Why aren’t you with me? Oh, why? I do want you so frightfully.  I want more than ever to travel with you; it seems to me now the height of my desire, and I get into despair wondering how it can ever be realised. Can it, do you think? Oh my lovely Virginia, it is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.
I do hope more and more that you won’t go to America, I am sure it would be too tiring for you, and anyway I am sure you wouldn’t like it. …
So we bundle along over Germany, and very dull it is — Surely I haven’t lost my zest for travel? No, it is not that; it is simply that I want to be with you and not with anybody else — But you will get bored if I go on saying this, only it comes back and back till it drips off my pen — Do you realise that I shall have to wait for over a fortnight before I can hear from you? poor me. I hadn’t thought of that before leaving, but now it bulks very large and horrible. What may not happen to you in the course of a fortnight? you may get ill, fall in love, Heaven knows what.
I shall work so hard, partly to please you, partly to please myself, partly to make the time go and have something to show for it. I treasure your sudden discourse on literature yesterday morning, — a send-off to me, rather like Polonius to Laertes. It is quite true that you have had infinitely more influence on me intellectually than anyone, and for this alone I love you.”
Shortly after she received this letter, Virginia Woolf came up with the idea for a new novel, inspired by Vita, who often liked to dress up in men’s clothes. That novel was Orlando: A Biography (1928), about a transgender writer who lives for hundreds of years. Vita’s son Nigel wrote, “The effect of Vita on Virginia is all contained in Orlando … in which she explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her.” He calls Orlando “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”
They ended their affair in the late 1920s but stayed friends until Virginia Woolf’s death in 1941. The relationship is chronicled in Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (1993), written by Suzanne Raitt . Vita and Virginia, a movie based on the book, was released in 2018.

from the Writer’s Almanac Jan 21, 2021

in Old October, all things on earth point home…

Thomas Wolfe wrote, “All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.

Especially those in the military long for the peaceful fire of the hearth and family

My Father Was a Young Man Then


by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Only 16, when he came from Italy alone,


moved into the Riverside neighborhood


full of Italians from Cilento—all of whom


 spoke the same dialect, so it was as though


they had transported those mountain villagers

to Paterson. At first, America was terrifying,


English, a language they could not master,


but my father was a young man


and he became friends with other young people


and they learned how to take buses and trains


or to borrow a car, and off they’d go


on the weekend to Rye Brook or Coney Island,


free from their factory jobs on the weekends,


reveling in the strength of their bodies,


the laughter and music and the company.

My father was a young man then,


and even when he died at 92

he never lost the happiness


that bubbled up in him,


the irrepressible joy of being alive,


the love of being with friends.

I imagine him in that time


before he married my mother,


before we were born,


before he had a tumor on his spine


that left him with a limp.


Imagine him with his broad smile,


his booming laugh, his generous spirit,


his sharp intelligence,


imagine him as a young man,


his head full of dreams,


his love of politics and math,


all the way into old age,


though his legs failed him,


though his body grew trembling and frail,


his mind never did.

When I’d arrive at the house


all those years after mom died, he’d smile
 at me with real pleasure,


the young man he was at 16 would emerge,


sit in the room with us


and laugh.
 
“My Father Was a Young Man Then” by Maria Mazziotti Gillan from What Blooms in Winter. © NYQ Books, 2016. Reprinted with permission.

I am not your mother…

       statues under Naples in Italy April 2019 taken by Joy Acey

 

The Usage of Not
by Jeanne Poland

I am not your mother…
yet you make my breast milk run.

I am not your father
yet I model balancing the bank account.

I am not your daughter
yet I prune your flowers and lovingly arrange them.

I am not your butler
yet I fold your clothes dryer cornered and straight.

I am not your teacher
yet I accord you director’s chair.

I am not your student
yet I listen and discern each distinction you create.

I am not your partner
yet I move with you, the icing on your cake.

Try to avoid me…
as I skittle down your tongue to the deep throat below!

From NY to Pordenone, Italy

Donatella and Jeanne in 1970’s Venice

.

drawn to each other

sisters search for autonomy

health and Italy!

Yellow Roses

I Meet My Grandmother in Italy

by Katrina Vandenberg

I find her where I least expect her,
Santa Marguerita, with yellow roses
in her hair. She laughs, deep

in the arms of that American GI,
her hair rolled like Hepburn’s, her lipstick
red as tiled Verona roofs. Then I remember

the Saturday before she died, the way
we stopped at a greenhouse and she said,
I’ll take for my granddaughter all

the plants you have with yellow flowers,
ignoring my protests until the Pontiac
was heaped with roses and verbena,

with lemon gladiola perfume I could gather
in my hands. She said, Take them
all; you need to have a happy life.

“I Meet My Grandmother in Italy” by Katrina Vandenberg from Atlas. © Milkweed Editions, 2004. Reprinted with permission.