The Good Light
There were always such beautiful shadows in your work,
Though many now dodge their taxes with your art. Rarely
As it seems, life involves death with every decision, which is
Why I miss the non-Euclidean idiom we used to argue over
Everything in the dictionary of what not to do. Somewhere
In a mix between Beaches and Häxan I have these weird
Memories of you sleeping when there’s no way I was there
To see you sleeping—a crystal ball above your bed lets
Tensors, in a tension of tenses, tongue-tie time and divine
Your urge to fearlessly abandon yourself to love as you
Understand love, where paradox gives way to paradox
And awareness is congratulated with awareness of how
This multiverse, in vast tribulation, ushers us on in unison
As one of many big bangs begins again to light the way.
Copyright © 2017 by Aaron Fagan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 11, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
“It has been said there are only two subjects in art: Eros and Thanatos (love and death). Or a datamosh of Beaches and Häxan. It has also been said there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes. The poem’s disposition is to transmogrify the ghoul factor I’ve witnessed in the wake of a friend’s suicide (an artist and gallerist) and the pernicious nature of the romantic imagination into an adult version of love. The source of suffering is a desire for nouns to be other than what they are, the very essence of metaphor. A quantum sonnet seemed like the right stage for a dissolution of the senses.”
—Aaron Fagan