TO HEMINGWAY AND KIERKEGAARD


The best parts of a book, they say
Are the wrecks of an author’s life
The endless sighs and cries
Mistaken as a prize.

The Artist’s Reward, they call it.
An art I’ll recreate
Their sighs and cries together
I here hallucinate.

“I love you just the way you are,”
Claims the eye of an archive
Snooping for endless logic
Too precious to survive.

To retrieve a recollection.
Passed in end a void
Draws on the eye too blind
By sensations overjoyed.

The checklist delivered at birth
A love completed in theory
I do, but not enough to
Sacrifice vision for memory.

“I love who I’ve become with you”
Cries deep and fervently
The intensity of a newly felt love
To transform a moment’s eternity.

But the seduction of the highest height
Engraves a false forever
To secure against the ruins of time
With a thread of artless pleasure.

If the seduction of aesthetics
Dare snare our love confined
I pledge to cause the strength
to leave our present behind.

“We shall chat for all eternity,”
Suggests the awakened artist.
“With our love as the subject
and you as the object.”

And so it begins
The tragedy of an artist’s soul
Because a story that doesn’t end
Cannot be a story told.

But if this is the story
I’m destined to create
Let not my beloved surrender
to this awry art called fate.

“I love you for who you could be.
for what we will become,”
Transfigures the universal
A fantasy rich as none.

A reality in construction
Lives only in the mind.
As reality is its destruction
And ends this love with time.

And if we dare hold forever
to be truer than the now
Then each moment wasted
Stands truer than our vow.

The Artist's Reward is simply
our faith in Eternity.
Synthesis of the temporal and eternal
With freedom and necessity.
Combined with the infinite and the finite
I found in your company.
Two artists and one masterpiece
Stands our humanity against destiny.

The best parts of a book
Are the gems of an author’s life
Sighs and cries I now realize
Are sweet, sweet tunes disguised.