Today and Forever

We are unutterably alone, essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important to us.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 5 April 1903

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Ruth, a Moabite, had come while Boaz slept,
and now lay at his feet, who knows what light
from what door in the heavens finding her breast
naked, tender to its stirring as his dreams.
But Boaz did not know Ruth came to him,
and Ruth did not know what God asked of her.
The night breathed out a freshness from wild
clumps of asphodels over the hills of Judah.
The dark was nuptial, and august, and solemn.
Hidden angels must have hovered over them,
for Ruth saw in the night sky, here and there,
a dark blue movement like a wing.
The breath of Boaz sleeping mixed
with a dull hush of brookwater in the moss.
It was the time of year when lilies open
and let go their sweetness on the hills.
Ruth was dreaming. Boaz slept. The grass looked black.
And little bells of sheep were trembling on the verge
of silence. Goodness came down clear as starlight
into the great calm where the lions go to drink.
All slept, all, from Ur to Bethlehem.
The stars enameled the deep black of the sky.
A narrow crescent in the low dark
of the west shone, while Ruth wondered,
lying still now, eyes half opened,
under twinging of their lids, what god
of the eternal summer passing dropped
his golden scythe there in that field of stars.

- Victor Hugo, Boaz Asleep, Translated by Brooks Haxton

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Every time we say goodbye, I die a little
Every time we say goodbye, I wonder why a little
Why the gods above me, who must be in the know
Think so little of me, they allow you to go?

When you're near there's such an air of spring about it
I can hear a lark somewhere begin to sing about it
There's no love song finer but how strange the change
From major to minor every time we say goodbye

When you're near there's such an air of spring about it
I can hear a lark somewhere begin to sing about it
There's no love song finer but how strange the change
From major to minor every time we say goodbye
We say goodbye

- Chet Baker, Every Time We Say Goodbye, The Very Best of Julie London