WEBVTT

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Title, "To Be Loved
Is to Be Dissolved."

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The title is from a
prose poem by Mark Jarman

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that I read a few years ago
in the APR, American Poetry

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Review, the magazine.

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And I just thought
it was so beautiful.

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That sort of abstract metaphor,
to be loved is to be dissolved,

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struck me as somehow
true, so I thought I could

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see what I could do with that.

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"A drop of ink in a bowl
of water, two bodies,

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the one so wholly absorbed in
the other, the other so wholly

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embracing of the one
that to the naked eye

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the white of the
white Florentine

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bowl through the
liquid is still as pure

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as that note in the aria of
the second act of La Traviata

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you once heard sustained
without the slightest vibrato.

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Yet you note the two are so
completely blended, a union has

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taken place.

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And so you've written to
the limits of analogy.

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Having fallen in
love at least once,

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you know full well it's the
world, not the self, that

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has transformed, the very air
a welcoming, sensuous element.

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A morning walk to
the corner bodega

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for a paper is an unhurried
swim in a mountain lake.

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And before that, when you step
from the hotel's enormous glass

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doors onto the portico, the
sound of a finely tuned Alfa

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Romeo, but the thrum of a
waterfall, a glad proclamation.

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Someone has named you adorato.

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Or before that, in the shower,
water cascading your limbs,

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wave after wave off the plastic
curtain, singing, 'vivo, vivo.'

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And even earlier, when
you surfaced from sleep

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as if breaking the
skin of a still pool,

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though having fallen
at least once,

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you know this
condition won't last.

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You look again
into the bowl where

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you can notice that in fact
the liquid has darkened,

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if ever so slightly,
and you wonder

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what shadow has been cast
across the whole of it."

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