ODe ON GIVING, WAr, AND The LIGhThOUSe AT ALeXANDrIA “Why Lie, I Need a Cold Beer” says the sign of the guy on the corner of Lafayette and Magnolia, so I give him a five because it’s ninety-four degrees, 100 percent humidity, and when he sees the bill he puts a sunburned hand on his heart. “Wanna get married?” I say no, but while driving through the sauna of that North Florida afternoon I realize it’s the only actual marriage proposal I’ve ever gotten, which means more to me than the hard cash in the pocket of my jeans, the ones and fives I stash to give the panhandlers who are lined up at the exit of the supermarket parking lot, a short gauntlet of men and women, who’ve seen harder times than I’ve glimpsed, outside a novel by Dickens or Zola, and since they’re always polite, thanking me, I thank them right back for the opportunity to give, because this dark world is filled with billboards advertising strip joints, gyms, funeral parlors, huckster televangelists with hymn books and Bibles, and though the Greeks called it agape as opposed to eros, the closest English word may be charity, what Buddhists call dana, one of six perfections, a kind of antidote to our slick world of want, or so it seems tonight in London where I’m walking home from the theater, the drone of war in the air, and I’m tipsy from a stop at the pub, Twelfth Night swirling in my head like a Renaissance mob storming Newgate or Tyburn, and a young man says, “God bless you, madam” when I hand him a pound coin. Oh, God, I think, I’m not sure what God is, but I know I can feel a current running through the world, amid the din, the grimy streets, headlines of war, under stars shining like the flame atop the Lighthouse at Pharos, leading ships from the dark and bottomless sea to the harbor at Alexandria with its library before burned by invaders, flames eating rolls of papyrus— Sophocles’ plays, the ripe, bitter poems of Catullus, all those kisses, Lesbia’s little bird—as they became again the thoughts they were when only a raging dream.
—Barbara Hamby Barbara Hamby teaches in the creative writing program at Florida State University in Tallahassee and studies with Julia DeHoff at the Namaste Yoga Center. Her latest book, All-Night Lingo Tango, was published in February 2009 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. During the spring 2009 semester, she was a visiting professor at the University of Houston and studied with Constance Braden at the Houston Iyengar Yoga Studio. 20
Yoga Samachar Spring / Summer 2010
