A Ramble

. I'm full of Thoreau (what an obtuse, wordy, falsely misanthropic, bearded man), and Sylvia Plath, of Emily Dickinson (that slippery, dark-haired flirt of a woman- darting all around me with her dashes and unexpected capitals) and Willa Cather (whom I was going to write about but simply couldn't, it's all too dear to my heart, that love story that ended in the orchard), of William Butler Yeats and Vincent Van Gogh (I asked SKY if Vincent would rather I have a copy of his sunflowers, or a real sunflower. SKY told me that, as Vincent had moods, it depended which mood I asked him in. A sunflower mood! Well then, said SKY, as anyone in a sunflower mood would know, Vincent would want me to have a sunflower, not a painting of a sunflower. I said he was probably right. I'd rather have a real sunflower and pretend Vincent loved the same one that to have a copy of a dead man's painting and pretend he made it only for me. I'm sure he made it for himself, and for the sunflowers.). I'm full of ecofeminist writers, and Gene Stratton Porter stories and of her limousine death, and of the phantom smell of hookah smoke and charcoal, I'm full of that kiss between Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman, of dead terrorists and dictators, of ribs jutting over swollen bellies. I'm full of the piercing wind of Ireland and wide wind of Alaska, the wetness of Vermont and salted fertility of Maine. I want to talk existentialism with SKY, but we're not together tonight, never on Sunday night. I'm full of longing, don't you see. Longing for new ideas, new words, new women and men who are nothing like me but whom I adore. I want to drink tea and read poetry all day with speckled sun over my thin lap. I want to marry and have my hair be a sunflower, to mirror SKY's name. I want to try a drug that makes me laugh never-ending, those unexpected fits I get when barely anything is funny. I want to have children named Henry and Samuel and Vincent and Alexander and Esther-Anne and Evelyn and I want them to all be like their father, but to have my eyes, or my hands. And we would all live happy ever after, though we don't exist. And nobody would drown themselves with pocketfuls of stones, and nobody would be exiled. Isn't that a thought, huh? Thoreau says he never met a man who was alive. I hope he didn't die to find he never really lived, that would disappoint us all, Henry.