"Poverty is your treasure.
Do not exchange it for an easy life."
Zen proverb.
"Beginning Again."
"Now, this is the truth of that particular fiction,
sweet angel.
I mean, she hopes you don't buy that story,
all that sweet domesticity, that tenderness,
that yielding and sexuality.
She remembers, for instance, her father only vaguely,
the glittering wreckage of his black hair rinsed
in oils, the sap of melting pomade
that leaked from his sideburns, which he dabbed with a hankie.
He inhabited his armchair like a black cloud, glum, cultivated,
his temper a downed power line that fishtailed back and forth
across their lives--
lethal hits, near misses.
To avoid it, they crept for miles over dangerous passes
to Ely, my precious.
They had stolen a car and were on the run,
sleeping in a tacky motel room, cooking
on a hot plate, terrified and free at last,
oh my darling girl, as you can only
be when you've become a fugitive from the domestic life
and are blessed with nothing that anyone could want,
when you are poor, when you are out of luck,
and when you are free at last."