Started writing a poem in response to Mallarme's incredible book on grief, love, lingering memories and sons. Will share a portion of this bad poem at the bottom that came freely without much planning or thought.

I respect especially his incredible humanity, to write on his son as not just his son (as in- not just as the loss of this relationship or identity Mallarme imagines for him) but also as an individual person. This is a rare and special thing few people can tap into, I've observed. To love someone fully as themselves, outside of their relationship to you. In these poem's the dead son's future life is also imagined and the speaker even takes on the role of the son himself at certain points. The empathy feels limitless and expansive, beyond what someone like me in grief is usually capable of.

Truthfully it also reminds me of my own father, whose favorite brother died 10+ years ago due to sickness and who's memory lingers strongly in my dad's daily life. These memories are tragic for him, painful, defined by the loss of someone to tragic and terrible illness. Even sweet memories cannot be expressed without the melancholy of this loss. Will it ever feel sweet or comforting to remember this person for him I wonder? I wish that it will be one day, not such a burden to him. I hope my difficult memories can be covered up as well, that I am not defined by tragedy, either of my own doing (the harm I cause of my free will) or from my death (accident or not).

/// Poem///

Like the spirit crossing
an icy river
Shaft of a tree
Brought down, its
Limb sideways, partially
in cool water lapping
limber movement sways
it deeper and out
the wind playing
I know the feeling

Temptation to imagine
To feel breath as touch
As memory not invention
As feeling not caricature

blooming heat in
the head as through liquid
still the fascination
with being inside
full of it
how it escapes
it peters, welcome
back even with pain
again selfish love
to want feeling of any
kind, any kind
of word in presence

to linger please
dawn eyeballs look up
and no ghost floats
so where the memory
is stored is not
corporeal or external,
internal sweet
white edge of the eyeball
that can’t be directly seen

when he holds him
in his mind
his sick body
is it ever pleasant?
To return to the worst
Last moment
Again to see
the worst vision
Of him,
Grey and scabbed
disadvantaged
Weak unfair

Always unfair ever also
Grateful for his brother
Friend, To return
alive inside
Him to float
Feel him floating near
Stable fixture
Touching his sight
again?

man and
absence —
the twin
spirit he unites
with when he
dreams, longs

— absence, alone
after death, once


the pious
burial of the
body, makes myste-
riously — this
admitted fiction —

A tragic stream of consciousness, p. être the most actual fragmented piece of writing I've ever read. Mallarmé's incapability to cope with his son's death and produce some coherent thoughts is tangible. The content is not as obscure as usual with his production, however the style adopted looks extremely disarranged and...well, fragmented.

"What, the thing I am saying/is true--it is not/only music ----/ etc."

I have recently had a series of fits reading criticism, a professional hazard, and I can imagine what critics might try to say about this poem. Instead, I will follow another recent (and happier) thread: finding books of lyric poetry that deliver beyond music and beyond artifice. Mallarme's inentent to create a vessel for his dead son resonates more deeply because it reamins in fragments, like Sappho's divine laments. And as a poet, well, I have not seen more immediately into another poet's mind, anywhere.