Of the Greatest Kindness and Homecoming of Loves True

 

Recounting Socrates’ myth of Er,

Plato says that souls of the damned

are deafened most where the exit

from Hell is closest and at hand,

 

and so deaf to music’s finest points

they stay affixed to torture and death

in true harmonies’ abysmal disconnect

while love which can’t be love at all

 

unless it’s love of the beautiful and good,

kalokagathos, that makes better, even whole,

those who turn themselves into its temple

and home—rising out of the blue within.

 

But doesn’t such one love’s stir, shiver,

and soar come and roll like drunken

tenderness, being there always, and yet

never reached, till it churns us into elixir

 

of which only something of the immortal

already, that something that was before,

and if before, then somehow always too,

can ever partake, share, taste, and know?