I Was Born at Night, But Not Last Night_ ). And if, as suggested in the poem's title, you can recognize "a kind of ecstasy of love, even a kind of prayer" in the lyrics' "love in a mist, love at a distance," why do you need to tell me that "I do not always grasp these things exactly"? I could imagine a certain type of connoisseur of the arts or of the sublime—and perhaps I may be one of these people—who might find the question of the real in the last stanza's rhetorical question almost as fascinating as the very idea of love itself. —Alain de Botton _The New Republic,_ March 20, 2002 * The title poem of John Ashbery's first book, _Some Trees_ (1959), uses repetition to turn a lover's statement into a paradoxical boast. From the first line, we know what is about to happen, but not how or why: "My lover, come in and sleep with me." † I love the fact that here "in" is used twice in the first line, as if to say "between" and "between me and myself." Then the words, each time a variant on "in," begin to disappear, and an act of love described in the last line loses its "in" (the first three "in"s) for "me" and "myself," and the last line describes a _love_ in the form of a _prayer._ As I write this, for instance, I find myself saying, "Oh, Lord, help me get through this morning" or "Oh, Lord, give me strength for this evening." —David Lehman # The Seduction of the Spirit **B** y some combination of faith and madness, she had come to believe that he was the man for her, the man that no other man could possibly be. She had been raised in a rural Midwestern town, at the start of the last century, when young women did not run away, not if they wanted to marry. A girl could expect, at best, to be invited for a week's visit to a man's home. After that visit, there would be no more talk of a future together. She expected to get married. She had been engaged at sixteen and was raised to believe that all of this was the normal way of things. She was not one of those very young women who made a bad match by leaving town and going out into the world to look for her knight in shining armor—a man who could whisk her away from this country where her family had lived since before the Civil War. She was too worldly and experienced to allow herself that naïve hope, yet neither was she sophisticated enough to abandon all hope. She had been raised in this town, and she knew that some marriages last a lifetime. It was a day in late October, near the end of the second year of her marriage, when she first saw him on the streets of their city. He was standing near a building, looking out at the street as if he were expecting someone. She was carrying her groceries home from the market, and as she passed him he looked up at her, startled by her eyes. At dinner that night she said to her husband, "I just saw you in the street. I just watched you for a minute. You're not that hard to get at." She told this to him with a twinkle in her eye, and when he did not reply, she looked from her husband to her mother and said, "Do you believe in ghosts?" There was a moment of silence before her mother answered, "Yes, I believe in ghosts." That was all there was to the conversation. It had nothing to do with ghosts or with love or with getting lost. If her husband had said, "There are ghosts. You should listen to the music. The ghosts will come at night," she would have said, "I believe in ghosts." Now she was living with the belief that there were ghosts, especially those ghosts that had something to do with her. One night, shortly after her mother's death, a voice seemed to tell her that she was to remain in this house for a while longer. There was not much time to wait before dawn came, and there was no way to know if she had stayed here long enough. She had already experienced the power of the belief. As she approached the house, a sense of relief came over her as if she had found herself where she needed to be. She did not knock on the front door, but at the back door and knocked lightly, as if expecting her mother to come running out. When no one answered her knock, she knew it was not the right place. She then pushed open the back door and went inside, knowing as she did so that she was beginning the day of a great freedom for her. The house was cold, but she was not cold at all. The sun was still low in the sky, and she could not see a single thing as she walked through the house. A large hall opened off the kitchen, and she walked toward the sound of voices. She knocked on a door near the end of the hall, and as she knocked, a small, shy dog walked slowly toward the door to greet her. The door opened and she saw a large, handsome dog lying in the doorway with the smaller dog beside him. His fur was sleek and shining, as if it had just been brushed. The voice that had first spoken to her—the voice that had come into the kitchen—came from the big dog, whose manner was gentle and serious. As if all of this were a part of the same dream, her son had been walking down the hall when she found herself at the door. He had been talking to her as if it were the most natural thing to do, and he had not tried to persuade her to leave the house. His eyes were alive and he had a grin on his face as if he were laughing at some private joke. They had both seemed to be waiting for this moment. She was surprised when he said, "Mama, this is Mr. M., the ghost dog." She looked at the dog and knew that it was him, though she did not see the likeness at all. There was something wonderful and wild about him that reminded her of how they had looked when they were younger, on the day that he had come to her after lunch. She loved that man. They stood in the doorway, the small dog lying down beside the man, and she was filled with a sense of joy that was at once a sadness, a mystery, a madness, a sense of great love and loss that is both hope and despair. There is a voice that comes to you in the night, and you hear it in all the voices you hear. It is a language that she does not understand, but she had heard it as it came to her in the days after her mother's death, and she had found its echo in the voices of her sons when they were young. Her husband had left the house some years before when the boys were still very small. When she asked him why he had come back so late, he looked at her strangely, as if he did not understand her question. "I want to live in a small town again," he told her, "and I want to hear my children laugh." She did not care for this town as a young woman. She was not a woman who enjoyed the ways of small-town life. It was not that she found it provincial or backward or uneducated, though she had met people who did feel that way. She had never shared their view. She did not find the city much of a better place, but she was not inclined to live in the country either, as many young people were. In the country, she sometimes felt the way she had felt on the train at night, as if she were going through a tunnel. She remembered driving on a rural road one spring afternoon and seeing a blue van parked in front of a barn, with a woman standing beside it. There was no one inside the van, but the woman looked at her as if she had come from someplace in the future. She had never quite understood the meaning of the woman in the van and the barn. She had seen other such scenes, as if her life were being offered back to her in pieces, and the pieces were coming from someplace that she did not know. Sometimes, in the dark, she felt as if she had been dropped off in a town that did not belong to her. There was no way to know if she had left the city or whether she had simply traveled back and forth across a road that no one would have seen. That is the way it was, but she could not say that she had a choice about it. It was as if a choice had already been made, and she was simply being offered the pieces of it. At home, her sons were busy. She listened to their voices in the other room. She felt the presence of their long lives moving in her body and making her tired. She heard the radio as she passed their rooms and stood before the mirror as she brushed her hair. She stood before the mirror thinking, He's not leaving you, but this was not something that she needed to know. It is not a matter of knowing, she thought. It is a matter of accepting. The day was cold when she woke up, and the boys were gone. There was a sense