Bad Poetry: Good Combinations

[Photo from Birds & Blooms]

Love is like a butterfly

and for a butterfly it's rare,

fleeting and flitting in the air.

Most butterflies don't even care

who flits beside them; if they do

it's to avoid their families, who

would lay their eggs on the same leaves

where all the young would starve and die.

Once or twice in their lives they fly

together, and no doubt they feel

a love that, while it lasts, is real.

So music's Lady Butterfly

sang sweet harmonics with a guy

for seven years; then off she flew,

for greater heights were in her view

than he, or you or I, ever knew.

Some combinations last for life.

Some people find "husband" or "wife"

a job description to live by.

If you're one of them, don't be shy.

To work in synergy is great;

the culmination of life's fate

it seems, when one has found a mate.

But time will pass, and loved ones too;

go on without them one must do,

whether because they chanced to die

or our own calling's passed them by.

Who'd be Comte, sunk in melancholy,

when life's called them to be like Dolly?

This is the cut-off point for tired eyes. End of the poem. Reading further is optional.

-----

Yesterday Magaly Guerrero invited the Poets & Storytellers United to write about "great combinations." 

At the same time, Vince Staten reminisced about how Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner had seemed like a great combination--both liked to wear crazy costumes while singing good oldfashioned country songs--but turned out not to be one. Wagoner doesn't seem to have been a good business partner for anybody, or able to sell music on his own, either, but Parton made a point of telling everybody that they were still friends and her song "I Will Always Love You" was for him. (Nobody even tried to claim it was the kind of love her husband needed to worry about, either. And if there'd been a scrap of evidence to support that claim, at the time, we could be sure it would've been made.)

Dolly Parton does not dress like a Real Southern Lady, on stage, but apparently she is one at heart. Still, that doesn't mean needing to be part of a combination. She's avoided other partnerships, even with Stella Parton, who is a professional musician with a congenial voice and style (and her natural sister). The rare butterfly that is Dolly Parton's voice flies alone. 

If you can be a soloist, I say, flaunt it. More of us sing better with other people. The trouble with a lot of popular music today is that people who have neither the vocal quality to make a recorded solo beautiful, nor the enunciation to make it understandable, are out there singing solos.

Anyway, the combination of reading these two posts close together reminded me of times when I've had the joy of working synergistically with another person. 

My brother, for the last five or six years of his short life.

A fellow writer, for about a year while she was sober.

The other "foster mother" of my adoptive sister, for the years when that sister was legally a child.

My adoptive sister, when she was my business's big asset.

My husband, when he was its even bigger asset.

Writers with whom I've worked on long-term writing projects; memorably, Zahara Heckscher and George Peters, whose names I can mention here because they're no longer alive.

The man known to cyberspace as my Significant Other, during the years when I was doing home renovation with him, for money, and not trying to depend on writing.

Many people seem to think of synergy only in terms of sex. Well that's natural. Bodies can feel pleasure alone but they feel so much more pleasure together. I feel very sorry for those who know no pleasures that last longer than the sexual kind does. Highly Sensory-Perceptive people know several, and it works the same way; doing things we enjoy doing in synergy with other people is much more fun than doing the same things alone. Cerebral pleasures like writing turn into hours of transcendent joy. We love the people who share these pleasures just as people love those with whom they've merely shared good sex. Arguably it's a different kind of love--I've never wanted to touch anyone with whom I've co-written anything--but I'd hate to try to commit to marriage with anyone with whom I didn't feel both kinds of love. 

But of all those partnerships that brought me so much joy, none's lasted very long. Time's passed, and the only loved one with whom there'd been a lifetime commitment turned out not to have much of a lifetime left when that commitment was made. (We thought he'd outlive me. We were so wrong.) 

So...this thought needed some sort of conclusion, and I thought of Auguste Comte, who made such a brilliant start as half of a writing team, then drifted off into what even his fans called premature senility, depression, and suicide attempts when the team broke up...and there was the poem.