from The Common Life
for Chester Kallman
…What draws
singular lives together in the first place,
loneliness, lust, ambition,
or mere convenience, is obvious, why they drop
or murder one another
clear enough: how they create, though, a common world
between them, like Bombelli’s
impossible yet useful numbers, no one
has yet explained.
…Howbeit,
fasting or feasting, we both know this: without
the Spirit we die, but life
without the Letter is in the worst of taste,
and always, though truth and love
can never realy differ, when they seem to,
the subaltern should be truth.
—W. H. A.
