You Want a Social Life, With Friends

Kenneth Koch

You want a social life, with friends

A pssionate love life as well

To work hard every day. What's true

Is of these three you may have two

And two can pay you dividends

But never may have three

There isn't time enough, my friends -

Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends -

To find the time to have love, work and friends.

Michelangelo had feeling

for Vittoria and Ceiling

But did he go to parties at day's end?

Homer nightly went to banquets

Wrote all day but had no lockets

Bright with pictures of his Girl.

I know one who loves and parties

And has done so since his thirties

But writes hardly anything at all.

Wait

Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now.

Distrust everything, if you have to.

But trust the hours. Haven’t they

carried you everywhere, up to now?

Personal events will become interesting again.

Hair will become interesting.

Pain will become interesting.

Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,

their memories are what give them

the need for other hands. And the desolation

of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness

carved out of such tiny beings as we are

asks to be filled; the need

for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.

Don’t go too early.

You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.

But no one is tired enough.

Only wait a while and listen.

Music of hair,

Music of pain,

music of looms weaving all our loves again.

Be there to hear it,

it will be the only time,

most of all to hear,

the flute of your whole existence,

rehearsed by the sorrows,

play itself into total exhaustion.