“That Mrs.
Lackobreath should admire anything so dissimilar to myself was a natural and
necessary evil.”
Edgar Poe in
“Loss of Breath”
“And via the passions I arrived at genuine
philosophy,”
Julie cited by
Edgar Poe in “Loss of Breath”
“No birth, no
love, without a corresponding death.”
Lucretius
What
does it do,
if the it is—
a
love significant,
once
one drops dead?
Or
when that love
is
transferred,
betrayed, and as
good
as
purloined—dead,
when
is the breath,
the
rung, the letter,
cut
below one’s step
above
that first abyss?
Or
is there souls’ entanglement
as
amidst embodied elements
by
which they last and even feel
one
another past the grave and every gap
as
if neither time nor space
nor
any death’s divide are to stay?
So what is
crossed out,
what is lost and
what is gained,
when we cross
each other,
crossing—hopping
over
to some other
love
or
life—someplace else?
How much does
that
make us, sliced
and
dismembered,
if you
disremember
that my soul is
still yours as
well?
From the depths
past any
reckoning
we are of two
minds,
two snakes
entangled
in a ceaseless
strife
of life and death.
At the banquet
of the entwined
Eroses
we both choose
and serve
one another’s
fills and wants.
Until
we turn around
Orpheus’
Eurydice’s turning,
that
fatal swing and swerving,
when
poetry was live and music,
poetry
was truth, and the soul—
the
light and its lyre or melodic flute,
an
instrument on which God, the Faun,
played
us—and so did Beethoven, Bach and Poe.
