Distant Intervals
“It is the distant dramas of friends that are hardest to conjure up.”
~ Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts, 239
“And it’s only at distant intervals that I see the friend to whom I’ve given all my affection”
~ Verlaine
My whole long youth I “lived” without him. When
He came along my “life” had been entrapped
In marriage. He became my Saracen
Whose scimitar-like maleness thunder-clapped
My wedding and my son and wife away.
My friends reviled him, all except his verse.
His compositions tended to dismay
Them all, making theirs seem paltry—or worse.
And then life separated him from me.
I went to jail and God and other bars.
He evanesced into infinity,
As distant as chords made from icy Mars.
..My life began and ended in a loss.
….His melodies were asteroids in dross.