It is likely one of the hardest issues in life — discerning where we end and the rest of the world begins, negotiating the permeable boundary between self and different, all of the whereas eager for its dissolution, longing to be let out from the jail of ourselves. That’s the reason we cherish nature and artwork, these supreme devices of unselfing, in Iris Murdoch’s pretty phrase; that’s the reason happiness, as Willa Cather so perfectly defined it, is so typically the sensation of being “dissolved into one thing full and nice.”
As a result of our sense of self is rooted in the body, it’s by way of the physique that we most readily and rapturously break the boundary within the ecstatic dissolution we name eros.
That’s what former U.S. Poet Laureate Maxine Kumin (June 6, 1925–February 6, 2014) explores in her delicate and beautiful 1970 poem “After Love,” present in her indispensable Selected Poems (public library).
AFTER LOVE
by Maxine KuminAfterward, the compromise.
Our bodies resume their boundaries.These legs, for example, mine.
Your arms take you again in.Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their possession.The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajarand overhead, a airplane
singsongs coming down.Nothing is modified, besides
there was a second whenthe wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands exterior the selflay calmly down, and slept.
Couple with Rilke on the relationship between love, sex, solitude, and creativity, then revisit Derek Walcott’s beautiful kindred-titled poem exploring the uncoupling not of our bodies however of souls — “Love After Love”
