Travel

I have never been to Buenos Aires or Juan-les-Pins
           for that matter, except in the dark

'40s and '50s films — and it was never Jean Seberg or
           Ingrid Bergman who ran up to me, shaking

the gold ocean from her short hair, looking into my eyes
           with all the lost minutes a black & white sea

withheld. Yet I recall the tangerine suns and sapphire
           lagoons on postcards of French Polynesia,

awash in junk shop drawers, and a lavish night sky
           over Yosemite, that deep blue table cloth

and the bread-crumb stars spinning evenly away from us
           toward a barricade of bright islands

we are never going to see. In this way, we received
           more darkness than light — the 10%

that escaped on the blast at the start, our souvenir
           of somewhere we've never been. Dreamers,

walkers in our easy sleep, we unfolded our arms and
           filled them with the lost destinations,

the local outskirts of the air, with the last image of the sea
           which compares us to clouds under sail,

in transit to who knows where. Sundown, and the shore
           birds head homeward with the song

that first pulled them away — the sky, like everything,
           still unresolved. You can hear the dark

rustling overhead, the sky we can never return to, empty-
           handed as we are with only our obvious

hearts as guide. Any way you look at it, it's a long way
           to go to have only come this far.

-- Christopher Buckley

This is love, to sit with someone you've known forever in a place you've been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it's time to go.

from Adverbs by Daniel Handler

Enjolras

"Enjolras was a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible. He was angelically beautiful. He was Antinous wild. You would have said, to see the thoughtful reflection of his eye, that he had already, in some preceding existence, passed through the revolutionary apocalypse. He had the tradition of it like an eyewitness. He knew all the little details of the grand thing, a pontifical and warrior nature, strange in a youth. He was officiating and militant; from the immediate point of view, a soldier of democracy; above the movement of the time, a priest of the ideal.... Like certain young men of the beginning of this century and the end of the last century, who became illustrious in early life, he had an exceedingly youthful look, as fresh as a young girl's, although he had hours of pallor. He was now a man, but he seemed a child still. His twenty-two years of age appeared seventeen; he was serious, he did not seem to know that there was on the earth a being called woman. He had but one passion, the right; but one thought, to remove all obstacles.... He was severe in his pleasures. Before everything but the republic, he chastely dropped his eyes. He was the marble lover of liberty. His speech was roughly inspired and had the tremor of a hymn. He astonished you by his soaring. Woe to the love affair that should venture to intrude upon him!"