["Something I learned about agape when I was young..."]
Something I learned about agape when I was young: the Iliad tells
us fellow-feeling is finite in communities. Brotherly love becomes a
number that has to be divided among persons—so if you’re too kind to
others, that might explain your neighbor’s graft. I sometimes wonder if
perception is the same; if the quantity of percepts, or our trove of eidetic
things, is not limitless but rather constant: the measure, say, of a sunlit
field. So if we dip like deep-sea divers to the world, we’ll have to use a
purse-seine to sieve our sense impressions. We’re hoarding the image
at our peril. That bluest scilla smeared by a finger writing in the grass?
Endangered. Poetry’s work is not to ravish, but diminish.
Copyright Credit: Christina Pugh, "[Something I learned about agape when I was young]" from Perception. Copyright © 2017 by Christina Pugh. Reprinted by permission of Four Way Books, www.fourwaybooks.com.
Source: Perception (Four Way Books, 2017)