I Cannot Say I Did Not

I asked, with everything I did not
have, to be born. And nowhere in any
of it was there meaning, there was only the asking
for being, and then the being, the turn
taken. I want to say that love
is the meaning, but I think that love may be
the means, what we ask with. 

Sharon Olds

Just Kids

It was our first and last show together. My work with my band and crew in the seventies would take me far from Robert and our universe. And as I toured the world I had time to reflect that Robert and I never traveled together. We never saw beyond New York save in books and never sat in an airplane holding each other's hand to ascend into a new sky and descend onto a new earth. 

Yet Robert and I had explored the frontier of our work and created space for each other. When I walked on the stages of the world without him I would close my eyes and picture him taking off his jacket, entering with me the infinite land of a thousand dances. 

Patti Smith (on Robert Mapplethorpe)