like rain

(...)

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

The last few stanzas of Robert Creeley's The Rain, as cited in the 21 February Issue of The London Review of Books in What Life Says to Us, by Stephen Burt.

I lifted the above image from the Wikipedia entry on Creeley. It's posted there without attribution, but it looks all the world to me like the collection of photographs that I saw recently [1] at the New York Public Library by Allen Ginsberg -- photographs of all his Beat buddies, presented in concert with the Kerouac exhibit where you can also see Kerouac's On the Road endless typed scroll and other exceedingly cool artifacts.

I dig the Beats, and really enjoyed the exhibit, with its spoken word recordings and sumi-like illustrations in Kerouac's hand, but as a woman I felt a little bit like I'd entered the boys' clubhouse with the crudely lettered "grils not allowed" sign outside.

They didn't like us much. At least Kerouac didn't.

But boy they liked to f*ck us.

Which, as any girl knows, is not the same thing.

[1] Looks like the show *just* closed. It was still open when I ducked in last Friday to use the third-floor washroom, but as of today the NYPL has relegated it to its Past Exhibitions category on their website. (See Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road and the gorgeous book published to support the exhibit.)

Update: Ron dropped by to point out that the photograph of Creeley is actually by the photographer Elsa Dorfman. Stay tuned: I expect to crush. Hard.