Via The New Yorker (Jan 2005)

Cruelty
(Vermont, 1965)

That was the year my friends were reading
Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet.
The idea of cruelty felt important,
like being so perfect an outlaw
you became a saint. The war was on,
muffled, distant. Where we were
everything happened a few years later
than it did in New York or San Francisco.
Some would say it was too easy
for us to be there, talking
about almost anything. Too easy now
to say we didn't have a clue.
I made it through the first few chapters
of Artaud, and never got to "Saint Genet,"
although I remember the cover clearly,
the dome of his head, his eyes, the stare
that claimed he knew something
I would never know. My friends
moved on to de Sade. And now
it occurs to me that during all those years
I never said "I love you" to anyone,
although I probably should have lied
at least twice, to see if it was a lie.
Meanwhile, the fields and mountains promised
to remain the same, and they didn't.
Great poems told us that nature
would never betray us, but that
really wasn't the point, was it?
And then the theatre of cruelty
stopped being shocking.
We all knew why.

-Lawrence Raab

I love THE NEW YORKER! I wish I could subscribe to it during the school year but the address change back at home and here at school make it far too complicated.