The silver net

Chapter 24: PROPOSAL

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About This Book

A sequence of lyrical meditations that shifts between dreamlike visions, confessional solitude, and mythic or biblical reverie. Recurring images of sea and shipwreck, roses and gardens, and masked or legendary figures are used to probe longing, shame, desire, and the hope for spiritual renewal. Poems alternate between dramatic monologue, fable-like sketches, and brief nocturnes, exploring the tensions between illusion and revelation, life and death, and love as both ensnaring and ennobling, producing a compact, contemplative cycle of symbolist-inflected verse.

PROPOSAL

Yes, I’m your brother, not by birth

Or any tie of earth:

Your brother—well, we can’t undo the past,—

Because kind mother Nature cast

Two minds into one mould.

Do not scorn, storm or scold,

That you, a girl, and I, a man, should be

Alike, I as it were your travesty,

Of course is very strange.

We’re the same work with here and there some trifling change:

You are de luxe on vellum, in the pride

Of silver clasps; I, in rough hide,

Bound anyhow.

But since ’tis so, then let us bow,

Accept the scheme,

Live, sigh, laugh, hope and dream,

Watch the play—

Grim or gay—

Side by side, you and I,

’Till we die.