Work-in-progress
“One might speak here of what the Greeks called “mania,” in terms of an intimate immanence rather than a merely external transcendence, though this immanence is not devoid of communication of an other, intimate transcendence,” IU 81.
Sitting in your car,
from the driver’s seat, you said,
“Look, Tom, a deer!” We
were parked by the cove,
talking in the warmth, the dark:
a shimmer ahead—
gone! Did the deer see
the delight in your eyes, to
see and be seen by
it? Interrupted
from being part of its strange
world beyond our world?
The dark between us
returns and yes I see it
still in your wide eyes.
THe poem opens with a chain of images moving from a command to the poet ‘Look!’ to the image of (blank but warm) darkness (in which it is hard to look), to a shimmer which is gone almost as soon as it appears. It then turns to the circulation of reciprocated desire, the delight of the look taht rejoices in being part of the exchange of recognition, of seeing and being seen. Yet this circuit is not perfect and endless (and fulfilled). It leads to more desire as the human particiapnt is left somehow half-empty by having been brought into that circuit with the strangeness of nature. As Desmond says, desire creates lack.
Fascinating reading of the new poem— darker than I was aware of! Tell me more when we talk!
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Very grateful for your commentary. I just added an epigraph from Desmond.
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