To Be a Drunken Nightingale

 

Between now and the day they put coins on my eyes, I want nothing more than to read as much poetry as I can, cross-culturally, both the surfaces and the depths, in as many languages as I am competent, and otherwise in faithful translation, until I emerge from the chrysalis an Emersonian professor of the Joyous Science, a Hafezean dancing Dervish, a drunken Nightingale.