I want your hands on my eyes

Sonnet 89

When I die, I want your hands on my eyes: 
I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands 
to pass their freshness over me once more: 
I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep. 
I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you 
to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together, 
to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.

I want what I love to continue to live, 
and you whom I love and sang above everything else 
to continue to flourish, full-flowered:

so that you can reach everything my love directs you to, 
so that my shadow can travel along in your hair, 
so that everything can learn the reason for my song. 

Pablo Neruda

Jonathan Franzen

My family lived in La Grange, IL the town adjacent to the east of Western Springs where this author grew up.  He was born the same year as our oldest son.

From the Writer's Almanac

It's the birthday [8/17/1959] of Jonathan Franzen (books by this author), born in Western Springs, Illinois (1959). He's the author of the acclaimed novels Freedom (2010) and The Corrections (2001), and has also written a memoir and two essay collections. His latest book is one of those essay collections; it's called Farther Away (2012).

Jonathan Franzen said: "I come from a kind of old-fashioned Midwest, and I live in a technocorporate, postironic, cool, late-late-late Eastern world. The two worlds hardly ever talk to each other, but they're completely, constantly talking to one another inside me. [...] I have my parents talking to me in my head and then other parts of myself talking back. I think this is potentially an interesting conversation."