Chris Greenhalgh
Reading between the Lines
from Of Love, Death and the Sea-Squirt
It is right that the philosophy section of the library
should be located on the top floor
where two biographers, unbeknown to each other,
work on the same definitive life.
There’s talk of a cache of love poems
addressed to a secret mistress
extending over thirty years
and talk, too, of Nazi sympathies.
The two write with Freudian omnivorousness
of birth, war, death and sex,
while a few miles away, the subject’s wife and executrix
feeds his letters to the shredder.
Later, both will comment on the irony of this.
One will liken the strips of paper
to the fronds of a plant freed to the air; the other
to the fingers of a man slipping from a precipice.
Page(s) 78
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