Between grief and nothing some will take grief,
but those who take nothing will surely regret
that they can’t be robbed in good time, that’s a thief,
of memories grief cannot make them forget.

In Jean-Paul Godard’s “Breathless” Patricia Clarke, whose short hair is like that of Marion Amsellem whom someone once accused of being a lesbian although, as someone said at her funeral today, “She hasn’t got a gay bone in her body, ” asks Jean-Paul Belmondo, who is lying in her hotel bedroom smoking a cigarette, of course, and trying to screw her for the third time in his life: “Do you know William Faulkner? ” “No, ” he replies. “Have you slept with him? ” “No, ” she replies, and adds, “He is a writer, and I want to read you something from “The Wild Palms.” And she reads aloud: “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”

5/20/08

gershon hepner

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/between-grief-and-nothing/