<bell's "to be"> 2003-05-15.1:49 a.m. To Be Marvin Bell How could I wake from childhood when everywhere I went there was breathing like a mother's breath at the ear of her child before words; when in all places there was touch and people who defied the magazines, who did not look perfect and dead; when my bodyguard was luck and my texts were songs and the humming of the planets. It was necessary that I hear a sizzle in the lungs, and a hum on the wires. Fate decreed that the magazines should multiply, the child in me gradually decipher the air, and the planets die. Fate, which is Kingdom Come, called me out of the crowd where I was shopping or doing some busywork, and told me to stop singing and just be. But I had an idea. Didn't the sun make it impossible to look at the sun? Wasn't the night known only by nuance, the darkness unstudied? If I contained the earth and all of its flowers but did not once look at them, would anyone know? Thus, in my neighborhood, passion--even rapture!-- survived in secret, and still a child appears in the guise of a grownup at dusk and story-time. back /& forth /& frosting names are often sad