Life could just as well be fiction. Perhaps it is. It is.
But it is a play we must play out.
Walt
Whitman and Emily Dickinson never met, although they could have, and each in
their own “queer” ways having changed poetry forever—untrapped the
possibilities of it. Would they have even liked each other? Whitman, the bold
political revolutionary (though literature classes have forgotten that of him)
who lamented “I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don’t believe I deserved my
friends.”
Then
Emily whose friends were almost mythologized by her, but like mythology held at
a distance. “I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too?” Her friends may
have preferred distance to whatever it was she offered at close range.
I like
to imagine these two souls reincarnating somewhere else upon a timeline and
becoming friends. Stormy but poetic, a friendship not meant to last between two
souls connected in ways they don’t realize, not knowing their past lifetimes as
the mother and father of modern American poetry.
I think
both of them might think “who cares?” Is it me really? Was it ever me? Was it
you? Their lives having intersected and
diverged, one day they both stumble upon the following Khalil Gibran poem and
fall in love with it. What is to be known of love in such a moment?
