Title, "To Be Loved Is to Be Dissolved."
The title is from a prose poem by Mark Jarman
that I read a few years ago in the APR, American Poetry
Review, the magazine.
And I just thought it was so beautiful.
That sort of abstract metaphor, to be loved is to be dissolved,
struck me as somehow true, so I thought I could
see what I could do with that.
"A drop of ink in a bowl of water, two bodies,
the one so wholly absorbed in the other, the other so wholly
embracing of the one that to the naked eye
the white of the white Florentine
bowl through the liquid is still as pure
as that note in the aria of the second act of La Traviata
you once heard sustained without the slightest vibrato.
Yet you note the two are so completely blended, a union has
taken place.
And so you've written to the limits of analogy.
Having fallen in love at least once,
you know full well it's the world, not the self, that
has transformed, the very air a welcoming, sensuous element.
A morning walk to the corner bodega
for a paper is an unhurried swim in a mountain lake.
And before that, when you step from the hotel's enormous glass
doors onto the portico, the sound of a finely tuned Alfa
Romeo, but the thrum of a waterfall, a glad proclamation.
Someone has named you adorato.
Or before that, in the shower, water cascading your limbs,
wave after wave off the plastic curtain, singing, 'vivo, vivo.'
And even earlier, when you surfaced from sleep
as if breaking the skin of a still pool,
though having fallen at least once,
you know this condition won't last.
You look again into the bowl where
you can notice that in fact the liquid has darkened,
if ever so slightly, and you wonder
what shadow has been cast across the whole of it."