“Phaedo” poem by Ben Zimmerman ’19

Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash

After David Foster Wallace’s “Lyndon”

In your death, you have come to realize that a thing is not made greater or lesser by the alteration of an existing form. But you cannot understand how two can become one. I will tell you.

The distance between a self and what it loves is not a physical distance. Love is not a word that joins separate bodies. All your life, you insisted that we were driven to a climactic plane, but you and I have missed each other. Ontology does not have a nexus. The immanence of life; in death becomes a soliloquy – the act of calling your name into an infinite space. Many times I have told you

Life is not the wake of a line. Your constant presence has not made you any less unassimilable. Through love’s inexorable must, totality has not been changed, only revealed.

Remember that disconsolate night in your office – you, pressed against the cold window, staring into the swollen blanket of night. Love must always span a distance.

 

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