Liebestod

by Robert Wexelblatt

The still bedroom was dimmed by blue drapes.

Though they were outside time it mattered

it should be a November afternoon

when exertion brought its own reward.

He was an expiring salmon expending the

last erg of energy in the sweet water

of his birth; wave on wave buoyed him

then dropped until he plumbed the

matrix of all metaphor, perishing

with limbs of lead into the dusky void—

only to renew the compulsive cycle

of recurrence heralded by Nietzsche,

framed by Klimt, explicated by Freud.

Was it the love of death,

the death of love, or merely one

soul lost in the release of spirit,

the love that feels like death?

Memory shuffles delight up with regret.

When did the Lovedeath turn to the death of

love, the death of love to the love of death?

Was it in the middle of a sentence

or in the silence between breath and breath?

 

 

Biography:

Robert Wexelblatt is professor of humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies. He has published essays, stories, and poems in a wide variety of journals, two story collections, Life in the Temperate Zone and The Decline of Our Neighborhood, a book of essays, Professors at Play; his novel, Zublinka Among Women, won the Indie Book Awards First Prize for Fiction. His most recent book is a short novel, Losses.