“To love without knowing whom I love remains a loving and a knowing that I love.” Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 111.
Here I am down here
alone in the rosy dusk
at the hurricane’s
far edge. Pale swans bob
in the high tide, some softly
croak. It’s a habit
of mine to visit
this place. I am a lover
without an other,
passive, expectant.
We will see what happens next.
The wind is rising.
The poet is alone with the rosy sky and the bay. His reflection on his habit of visiting the place gives us a view of a relationship. The details of the place and its animals and other phenomena are thus charged with subjectivity. Yet the descriptions of them are not simply records of the poet’s impressions. They are also descriptions of objective detail. This detail is rendered delightful by the poet’s habit of visiting and attending to them. He perceives their loveliness. The poet emerges as lover without other. Yet the poem reveals him as the beloved of the lover who loved all this to be.