Love, like poetry is
a kenosis as Bloom says, or
an emptying. It is the inexactitude of
the measure of the self,
the terrible widening of space within space,
an anti-clarity which is the clarity of being
within oneself, and this is what the Greeks
called Eros:
This:
physical
wavering-repetition and
recognition
of the incompleteness which is love.
Just the intuition that I am
not as separate as I once was
when I wanted to kiss Olivia in the supermarket
when she told me that she had left him,
or that evening last spring when I decided I wanted to be a painter
and did that portrait of a naked woman in red.
The soul is image ensnared in sound
which ripples out infinitely into empty space
and we need to just
put up some obstacles so that we may
reflect
the soul
and so capture it back in the center of itself.
We are always,
always
in search of a mending.
Our
souls rent
by the bumping about
in the dark and getting caught
on nails.
It is not the absence of ideas,
but the absence of real ideas,
about real things,
not just tables and chairs,
but love or painting or literature:
I still think about
Gloria taking out a copy of Hopscotch (English for Rayuela)
from her purse when we met outside the Notre Dame that night last summer
to see if I had come there for her, La Maga,
and if I knew
that
life must be met
with some idea bigger than life, some
poetics
which cannot be reduced but is yet not
some grand edifice of rationality:
Molly Bloom’s soliloquy,
Mrs. Dalloway buying flowers,
or
Debussy while it rains.
The plainness of art or truth,
the correspondence of life within life
like a glob of blue genius in a white room,
folding out and collapsing upon itself trying to attain
a shape.
Rilke studied Rodin, watching the
master in his studio,
moved:
by the stillness of the old man who had
somehow
been able to make love tangible
and had let trembling Eros dissipate
into the shape of time which is image:
And it is,
the thought of Olivia in her kitchen with the windows open and nobody in the house which we agreed was lovely in the spring but so terrible in winter…
It is like Rilke’s Panther, life radiating
out
into life:
so that life
is imaged as it
is:
in the intellect
of love.