sour grapes

You cannot have everything you want. Get used to it. You always want what you cannot have. You've got used to that as well! Predictably irrational.

What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished?
---Milosz.

Listen you son of a bitch, life isn't always a goddam football game! You won't always get the girl. Life is rejection and pain and loss.

--Exley

Would you like some of these delicious purple grapes dear fox, asked crow.

No thank you crow, I probably wouldn't like them anyway. The swami had said: "never try what you don't like and never like what you don't try".

But you are a fox, fox, and a fox should know many things. I've a good mind to...khair...

But tell me my beloved crow, you whose mind is like bronze and whose will as resolute as stone, if I drink this pleasing wine of yours will I be free, like you, alone above the world?

Oh fox, the problem with you is that you ask too many questions! And they're usually the wrong ones as well! Remember Khayyam said drink and forget your bondage to the idol of the days. You have been tamed by your love..an oriental at heart if ever there was one! But I, I am free to desire what I cannot have, to imagine and love blue flowers and blue horizons, to dream much and to visit distant lands that do not exist.

Fox, who hadn't been to university, found it difficult to comprehend crow's wise words. Too worldly to truly appreciate crow's beautiful, wondrous poetic soul. And he began to hate crow, hate the thing he loved.

But still fox looked up to crow, munching on her grapes, oblivious of poor old fox and what he was going through. Fox was lost, crow found.

sky gathers light

a figure a long way off could be, un-

named, the centre of the world and in between

this known and this unknown, the exclusive, the vague,

in these gaps we gather guilt, and love, and die.

Crow asked fox why he was sad, why he was always hanging around this tree if he really didn't like the grapes.

That's hard to say, answered fox gingerly. Was it the light within that failed or fate itself? Had I wished it otherwise would I have broken through the dark glass, would the mirage have fallen away? Who can say? I am me, and you are you.One of us lives, one of us dies, but which one of us is free?

Crow laughed at fox. Oh fox, you are silly,what can you possibly mean?! You do talk utter nonsense sometimes.

Well, crow, you have never thought of me, so if you can really desire what you cannot imagine possible, then wish yourself me.

But that is easy, little fox! And crow fell from her great height, to be a bit like fox. As she did so fox, with one almighty leap, pounced on her and devoured her and the grapes in one gleeful swoop.The red and the black, the red and the black...

cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing

pilgrimage of water, vast stillness

of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,

animal voices...wind

conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering

of fire to coal.

But the swami was right...those grapes, even in such a sweet mouth, tasted sour!

---John Riley and Denise Levertov.