poetry

Cecily and Ishmaël, on marriage.

Cecily: I may still have to get married.

Ishmaël: You know I’ll run for it.

Cecily: Run from it is my suggestion.

Ishmaël: Why would you fill my heart with disillusion?

Cecily: The butterfly drinks its own nectar my dear. I fill it not. Drink only from lovely flowers, and you shall be saved from your disillusionment.

Ishmaël: What a poet thou art, Cecily Shelley Keats Tennyson.

Cecily: Egad! I already have too many last names to get married.

Alexander, about gluten free.

Alexander: I’d love to try being gluten free at some point, but during this chapter of my life, I’m quite content having an extra three kilos and a perpetual cloud of shame hanging about my head.

Alexander, on life changes.

Alexander: I have begun to eat meat again and stopped recycling; it’s doing wonders for my creative flow.

Alexander, on love and Portland.

Alexander: I think this is the death of me — falling in love with a man on the West Coast and relaxing further into the blissful black hole of soft drugs and rampant socially acceptable alcoholism that is Portland.

Alexander, on June.

Alexander: And my semi-obscure French word for June is rightfully, in my opinion anyway, “frisson”.

Two friends, on the conventional.

Arnaud: Who is Lina?

Cecily: A good friend of mine.

Arnaud: I have seen her in photographs. She is extraordinarily gorgeous. Is she weird, or desperately conventional?

Two friends, on gardens.

Cecily: Kipling once wrote, “Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful’, and sitting in the shade”.

Ishmael: I like that. How can I use it?

Cecily: Well, for me it means something about embracing motivated change in all forms. Making active decisions. Never getting complacent. We grow our gardens — alone or with others — and some seasons are made for poppies and others for Japanese maples and others for stones or sand to be tilled gently.

Ishmael: That’s beautiful.

Cecily: It’s beautiful or it’s trite. But sometimes there is beauty in the trite.