The match could not have been more perfect: our two closest friends in the world — my best friend of fifteen years, your former college roommate, both simultaneously single at last. After half a decade of half-secret crushes, missed connections and ill-timed rendezvous, the timing was finally right.

And a month later it was over.

I met My Closest Friend in our freshman year of high school, when he sold me a Squier P-Bass from the back row of our homeroom history class. In the twilight of our twenties, through the haze of desert dust and barroom brawls, he remains my closest brother, at least with whom I share no parentage. (Though he has taken to calling Carol “Grandma.”) Close from the start, our early friendship puts me in mind of Balzac’s with his titular classmate in Louis Lambert:

It was long before I fully knew the poetry and the wealth of ideas that lay hidden in my companion’s heart and brain. It was not till I was thirty years of age, till my experience was matured and condensed, till the flash of an intense illumination had thrown a fresh light upon it, that I was capable of understanding all the bearings of the phenomena which I witnessed at that early time. …So it was time alone that initiated me into the meaning of the events and facts that were crowded into that obscure life…

In hindsight, your sisterhood with Your Closest Friend seems almost predestined: you an only child, she the sole daughter among brothers. Though only faint acquaintances through high school, when you discovered you had been accepted to the same university halfway across the country the decision to room together became a foregone conclusion, two girls in a foreign territory glued together by pure cosmic chance. When you were assigned your first dorm room to share, you aligned your beds facing one another so that in the night you might wave to one another, offering constant reassurance: you are not alone.

In Plato’s Lysis, Socrates’ interlocutors ask him to define philos, whose varied meanings range from “friendly” to “beloved.” Socrates in turn asks his questioners whether desire for the object of one’s heart — be it the desire to love or the desire to befriend — can ever be separated from longing, from the space created in the subject who desires. We find Socrates punning on the multiple connotations of oikeios, which could include “like myself” or “belong to myself”:

…Τοῦ οἰκɛίου δή, ὡς ἔοικɛν, ὅ τɛ ἔρως καὶ ἡ φιλία καὶ ἡ ἐπιθυμία τυγχάνɛι οὖσα, ὠς φαίνɛται, ὦ Μɛνέξɛνέ τɛ καὶ Λύσι.—Συνɛϕάτην.—Ὑμɛῖς ἄρα ɛἰ φίλοι ἐστὸν ἀλλήλοις, φύσɛι πῃ οἰκɛῖοί ἐσθ’ ὑμῖν αὐτοῖς.

…Desire and love and longing are directed at that which is akin to oneself [tou oikeiou], it seems. So if you two are loving friends [philoi] of one another then in some natural way you belong to one another [oikeioi esth’].

It’s typical Socrates would drift between meanings, cherrypicking the one which best fits his thesis at any given moment, as if it were the same thing to recognize in someone else a kindred soul and to claim that soul as your own possession, as if it were perfectly acceptable in matters of the heart to blur the borders between yourself and the one you love. After all, the lover’s reasoning and hopes of happiness are wholly built upon this misapprehension, this blurred distinction. So the lover’s thought process moves continuously, scavenging the borderland of language, the domain of the vague where misunderstanding occurs. But for what does the lover’s heart scavenge?

In addressing his two philoi, Socrates intentionally confuses reflexive and reciprocal pronouns. When he says to them you belong to one another he uses as “one another” the word hautois, which more commonly means yourselves. Together with his “chum,” the precocious Louis Lambert, Balzac discovers the same truth:

Lambert himself explained everything by his theory of the angels. To him pure love — love as we dream of it in youth — was the coalescence of two angelic natures. Nothing could exceed the fervency with which he longed to meet a woman angel. And who better than he could inspire or feel love? If anything could give an impression of an exquisite nature, was it not the amiability and kindliness that marked his feelings, his words, his actions, his slightest gestures, the conjugal regard that united us as boys, and that we expressed when we called ourselves chums? …There was no distinction for us between my ideas and his. We imitated each other’s handwriting, so that one might write the tasks of both...

So if you two are philoi, Socrates tells the “chums,” then in some natural way you belong to one another. There is no distinction between one’s ideas and those of the other. Through his diction, Socrates plays upon the desires of the young lovers before him, dancing on the edge between words to offer the possibility of grasping a better truth, a truer meaning, than could be available from the separate senses of distinct words. But the glimpse of that enhanced meaning, when it flashes past, is a painful thing, inseparable from your conviction of its impossibility: words have edges. So do you.

But lessons in love are hard to take. Let us look to Virginia Woolf’s Neville in The Waves when he sees his beloved Bernard:

Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody — with whom? — with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?

I can’t speak to your feelings when you first met Your Closest Friend. But what both Socrates and Woolf offer here is the outline of what any lover, of anyone, learns in an instant from the experience of love: a vivid and terrible lesson on the nature of his own being. When desire inhabits the lover, there appears within him a sudden vision of a different self, perhaps a better self, compounded of his own being and that of his beloved as the self expands to include another in a complex, even unnerving occurrence sparked by erotic accident.

When she graduated early at age fifteen from the competitive Bronx High School of Science, Marilyn Hacker already took herself seriously as a writer. So it should come as no surprise she would fall in with another brightly burning young prodigy, her classmate Samuel R. Delany, who by twenty had already written ten novels. The two writers bonded over a mutual interest in other precocious genii, including Rimbaud and Natalia Crane, and when both were nineteen the couple drove to Detroit, the closest state which would grant their interracial marriage legal status. And so Hacker, a lesbian, married Delany, a gay man.

And yet despite this apparent incongruity, Hacker and Delany’s marriage was never a sham. Back in New York, the young couple welcomed a wide variety of guests into their home, from Hacker’s sometimes-mentor W. H. Auden — who nearly burned down the Lower East Side apartment flicking a cigarette into the garbage — to the men Delany picked up around town, immortalized both in his memoirs such as Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and in Hacker’s poems such as “Nights of 1962: The River Merchant’s Wife“:

He / was gone two days; might bring back, on the third, / some kind of night music I’d never heard: / Sonny the burglar, paunched with breakfast beers; / olive-skinned Simon, who made fake Vermeers…

Delany writes of his and Hacker’s early married life in The Motion of Light in Water:

Watching this thin young woman in thick glasses write her early poems, being around her while the detritus of daily life was transmuted into lines of dizzying musicality, not to mention being the poems’ first reader, was unspeakably exciting. It made my whole adolescence and early manhood an adventure — an adventure I was thrilled and pleased to be sitting at the edge of.

The perceptions apprehended in love appear somehow uniquely true, and more truly your own, as if they have been won from reality at personal cost. Perhaps they have been. The deepest, truest certainty is the conviction of your beloved as a necessary complement to yourself. From the depths of eros your mind conspires to create this vision, calling up possibilities outside reality. A new hybrid creature begins to rise, one you convince yourself is the true you despite the fact it is built from your and your lover’s dual natures. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes offers his famous parable of the twin flames: long ago, humans were eight-limbed, two-headed creatures powerful enough to constantly threaten to overthrow the Gods. In response, Zeus cut all of the creatures in half, forcing each segment to spend their lives searching for their long-lost twin flames.

From the pit of desire, every lover feels they have found their other half. Suddenly possessed of godliness, for an instant the entire world feels within your grasp. Then reality sets in. You are not a god. You are not the hybrid creature. In fact, you are not even a whole self, sapped of your own nature as you are by the forces of desire and lack. You find yourself convinced of the sinking suspicion Lacan was right all along: your newly-discovered knowledge of the possible is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.

While on a tour of the province of Connacht, the ollave (a school of eighth-century Irish bard) Líadan of Corkaguiney happened to meet Cuirithir mac Doborchu, a fellow poet native to the region. Cuirithir begged Líadan to marry him, prophesying their progeny would be Ireland’s greatest poet. Weighing his proposal as she continued her travels, Líadan finally assented on one condition: a vow of chastity. The newlyweds would spend the rest of their lives in the monastery of Saint Cummine, where they avoided temptation by undertaking another agreement: for the rest of their lives Líadan and Cuirithir could choose to see each other without speaking or spend their lives separated by a wall, their only contact the words they could exchange through a gap between the stones. Poets at heart, they elected to spend their lives speaking invisibly.

Hacker and Delany’s daughter Iva was born in 1974, the same year the couple separated, though they would remain legally married until 1980. Two years later, Hacker would publish her aptly-titled second collection Separations, in which she included a poem titled “The Song of Líadan”:

(First, the word,

after the word, the cry,

after the cry, the song.

When will we know what we are seeking?)

You have imposed upon me a treaty of silence.

You have sealed my lips’ stone with passion.

You have melted the speaking stone with your hand’s heat

and your warm mouth is a band on mine.

There is a scream between us I have smothered.

There is a loud song frozen on the cold road.

A smothered scream, a loud song frozen on the cold road. Despite her vow of celibate speech, Líadan finds herself silenced:

My love is locked in a room without windows.

My ears are invaded by dissonant bells

sudden in cobbled silence. I cannot speak,

and in my body is a fear like metal.

In Líadan’s silence echo the mute words of another poet writing a millennium prior, Sappho. Her fragment 31 offers perhaps the definitive example of lovestruck silence:

φαίνɛταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν	He seems to me equal to gods, that man, who
ἔμμɛν’ ὤνηρ, ὄττις ἐνάντιός τοι	ever he is, who takes his seat so close
ἰσδάνɛι καὶ πλάσιον ἆδυ φωνɛί—	across from you, and listens raptly to
σας ὐπακούɛι	your lilting voice
καὶ γɛλαίσας ἰμέροɛν, τό μ’ ἦ μὰν	and lovely laughter, which, as it wafts by,
καρδίαν ἐν στήθɛσιν ἐπτόαισɛν,	sets the heart in my ribcage fluttering;
ὠς γὰρ ἔς σ’ ἴδω ϐρόχɛ’ ὤς μɛ φώναι—	as soon as I glance at you a moment, I
σ’ οὐδ’ ἔν ἔτ’ ɛἴκɛι,	can’t say a thing,
ἀλλ’ ἄκαν μὲν γλῶσσα †ἔαγɛ λέπτον	and my tongue stiffens into silence, thin
δ’ αὔτικα χρῷ πῦρ ὐπαδɛδρόμηκɛν,	flames underneath my skin prickle and spark,
ὀππάτɛσσι δ’ οὐδ’ ἔν ὄρημμ’, ἐπιρρόμ—	a rush of blood booms in my ears, and then
βɛισι δ’ ἄκουαι,	my eyes go dark,
†έκαδɛ μ’ ἴδρως ψῦχρος κακχέɛται† τρόμος δὲ	and sweat pours coldly over me, and all
παῖσαν ἄγρɛι, χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας	my body shakes, suddenly sallower
ἔμμι, τɛθνάκην δ’ ὀλίγω ’πιδɛύης	than summer grass, and death, I fear and feel,
φαίνομ᾿ †αι	is very near.

At the beginning of Sappho’s poem we are nowhere, perhaps even locked in Líadan’s “room without windows.” The poem floats toward us from out of the darkness. We know not why the girl laughs nor what she feels about “that man, whoever he is.” That man cannot even be said to exist in the first line; he merely seems. In the line which follows he disappears into a pronoun (ottis) so ambiguous scholars have never agreed on its precise meaning; a few weeks ago, when I ran Sappho’s fragment through a digital translation, the word in question was reduced merely to “entity.” (The digital translation produced other interesting results: the fourth line, σας ὐπακούɛι, translated as your lilting voice (Chris Childers) or your sweet speaking (Anne Carson), becomes instead he obeys you.)

And in the next moment, the poet herself steps out from her hiding place behind a relative clause, when the combination of lilting voice and lovely laughter combine and “sets the heart in my ribcage fluttering” (Childers) and “puts the heart in my chest on wings” (Carson) “as soon as I glance at you a moment” (Childers), “then no speaking / is left in me” (Carson).

The poem cannot be said to center on characters per se — the girl referred to by the poet’s second person address is made only slightly more material than that man solely by her voice and laughter — but rather on the geometric relations inherent to their perceptions of each other and the distances between those perceptions. “That man… listens raptly” to you, to “your sweet speaking.” He obeys you. The poet sees him, then “glance[s] at you a moment.” Their attentions converge on your lovely laughter, forming a triangle.

And yet for Sappho the triangle, constructed though it may be from unbridgeable gaps between perceptions, forms not the infrastructure of jealousy, despite what some critics have read in the fragment. In the fifteenth century Italian dramatic dances known as bassa danza, a dance called Jealousy featured three couples swapping partners and during which “each man goes through a stage of standing by himself apart from the others.” Instability preys on the mind of the jealous lover: it’s a dance in which everyone moves.

Sappho, on the other hand, cannot move. Death, I fear and feel, is very near; were she to partake in the bassa danza and change places with that man, the reader gets the sense she would be destroyed. “Standing by [her]self apart from the others,” Sappho fears not for her position, nor does she appear to envy that man his. Her attentions are directed purely and solely at you. Despite seeming “equal to the gods,” Sappho places that man as a mere observer, as if his position is only to measure and confirm the thin flames which prickle and spark. His rhetorical placement is not uncommon in love poetry: think of Pindar, who sees his love and “melt[s] like wax as the heat bites into it” while another “whose black heart was forged of adamant or iron in a cold flame” sits by unmoved, or the similar Hellenistic epigram which tells the reader “if you looked upon my beloved and were not broken by desire, you are totally god or totally stone.”

But while he seems to me equal to gods, that man, whoever he is, is not totally god or totally stone. Again, these characters cannot be said to truly exist in any embodied form, and the clearest location the action of the poem finds is revealed only once Sappho’s own heart begins to flutter in her ribcage, shifting focus from that man and you to the inner workings of Sappho’s own heart and mind. Death, I fear and feel, is very near; Carson translates this final line as

dead — or almost

I seem to me.

“Equal to the gods,” he seems. “Dead — or almost,” Sappho herself seems. Sappho’s fragment is a poem of seeming, of appearances and sensations as they appear within the mind. Hers is not a poem of the material world. Pindar situates himself contra his impassive rhetorical observer — only an iron-hearted god, one whose heart is beyond nature, could be unmoved by the object of his desire — and thereby aligns himself with normative human desire. That normative desire has as much a place in Sappho’s poem-world as jealousy. This is the record of how a singular mind constructs a singular desire. That man is no mere rhetorical device or expression of sentiment. He is an intention. Desire seems to Sappho — it takes real, physical shape — in the form of a three-point structure, what we might in modern parlance call a love triangle. Inside that triangle seems to Sappho the very constitution of desire: the lover, the beloved, and the gap between them. If desire is lack, it can only be activated by the space between the other two components. Lack bridges them even as it divides, keeping two from becoming one. That man... seems to me equal to gods, while Sappho fears and feels the close presence of death. Both responses live in the poet’s mind. No one moves in this dance; there is no need. Desire dances between them.

He / was gone two days; might bring back, on the third, / some kind of night music I’d never heard…

“Are you not amazed,” asks Longinus in De Sublimitate, “how at one instant she summons, as though they were all alien from herself and dispersed, soul, body, ears, tongue, eyes, color? Uniting contradictions, she is, at one and the same time, hot and cold, in her senses and out of her mind, for she is either terrified or at the point of death. The effect desired is that not one passion only should be seen in her, but a concourse of the passions. All such things occur in the case of lovers, but it is, as I said, the selection of the most striking of them and their combination into a single whole that has produced the singular excellence of the passage.”

Another, shorter fragment displays Sappho at perhaps her most powerfully concise:

οἶον τὸ γλυκύμαλον ἐρɛύθɛται ἄκρῳ ἐπ’ ὔσδῳ,

ἄκρον ἐπ’ ἀκροτάτῳ, λɛλάθοντο δὲ μαλοδρόπηɛς,

οὐ μὰν ἐκλɛλάθοντ’, ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἐδύναντ’ ἐπίκɛσθαι

…like the reddening apple,
at the tip of the topmost twig,
which the apple-pickers missed —
or no, not missed entirely;
the one they could not reach.

Fragmented; incomplete; perfect. One sentence, no verb, no subject. No arrival at its main clause. One simile, like the reddening apple, but what is like can never be known. The comparison vanishes, missed — or no, not missed entirely; the one they could not reach. Grasping hands reach, enclosing around empty air in the final line, for the apple dangling just a few lines above.

These brief lines (translated above by Gillian Spraggs) trace a trajectory from perception — the apple — to judgment — why it remains unpicked. After its first appearance, the poet adds detail, finding a precise location “at the tip of the topmost twig.” From location in space comes location of a different kind, as Sappho searches for an explanation — the apple-pickers missed. Then that logic is further extended: they could not reach. The fragment is one of constant amendment, each successively revealed element subjected to correction, impressions revised and reasserted. Sappho’s syntax echoes this process as initial interpretations extend from each other: akrō… akron… akrotatō lelathonto… eklelathont’.

(Again, machine translation gives rise to an evocative poetic fragment of its own from just those few syllables:

to the end / on screen / unheard, spoken / they cried)

Beyond diction, Sappho’s rhythm again marries content and form, as the bouncing triplets of the first lines stretch out into evenly-stressed spondees by the fragment’s end, fingers splayed, reaching for the apple. Even the computer translation above cannot help but echo Sappho’s meter, the dactyl to the end giving way to solemn disyllabic phrases as the apple looms further out of reach. “Desire isn’t appeased by its object, only irritated into something more than desire that can join with the stars to inform the chaotic heavens with sense,” writes Delany in his novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. “Fingers can’t point to anything anymore. And without such indications — oh, I still walk where I walked, look where I looked, but where I saw what once seemed wonderful, I see so little now — I feel so little.”

We begin with an apple and find ourselves in unending longing. Eros’ perpetual reach is defined in action even as its attempt is perennially foiled. Between fingers closing around the unreachable, between glances stolen across crowded rooms, between I love yous and I love you, toos, the specter of desire is given space to haunt. Grasping reach, furtive looks, I love yous, all are mere echoes through space of the one incontrovertible, insoluble boundary between us: the border between flesh and self. Desire defies the edge, forcing together opposites. Eros bounds from the lover to the object of their affection and springs back into the heretofore unnoticed abyss within the lover. No poet truly writes of their beloved. A poem is always and can only ever be a description of a hole.

A pendulum strikes on metal

and in my quick heart is the silence of bound hands.

So says Hacker’s Líadan.

In 1965 Delany took a sort of sabbatical from his marriage, hitchhiking to the Gulf Coast to spend a summer on shrimp boats before spending a year in the Mediterranean, eventually returning to the U.S. to live on communes in New York and San Francisco, an experience he details in his excellent memoir Heavenly Breakfast. “Chip is interested in the labyrinth,” says Junot Díaz, referring to Delany by his well-known nickname. “He’s interested in how the only path to any kind of understanding is to get lost.”

The coming of spring is insidious and cruel.

The mist pervades my throat as it melted the crystal

my voice was. I am weak, and I much preferred

the hard agreement of our truce of gauntlets.

Some weeks after the breakup, My Closest Friend and I convened for a night of playing music and ingesting foreign fungi, a combination which unsurprisingly created the conditions for a relationship postmortem.

“I should text her,” he offered. “I should reach out and see how she’s doing.”

I warned him that unless he hoped to rekindle their relationship, reaching out didn’t strike me as the best idea. He made it clear he still cared for her deeply. Why then, I asked, did they have to break apart?

“I just need my freedom,” he said. “To do all this.” He gestured around the room at our other friends, at the assorted instruments.

I reminded him you and I had been married nearly five years by that time already. I’m still here. I’m still doing this. I reminded him of my time on the road, of my sojourns across the world playing music, pursuing one thing I love while separated by half the globe from the other. I didn’t say it then, but Díaz’ comment about Delany echoed through my mind: The only path to any kind of understanding is to get lost.

One night on tour with Executioner’s Mask in Florida, the distance very nearly became too much. After the protracted breakup of my band of a decade-plus, after two years shuttered inside as the pandemic festered, the very idea of spending a night in Orlando playing to a room full of strangers felt wholly alien. Outside the bar, I called you in near-hysteria. As tears welled in my eyes, I broke down and confessed to you just how lost I had become.

I don’t remember your exact words, but they fell somewhere along these lines: The only path to any kind of understanding is to get lost.

We don’t know who, but someone — maybe Archilochus — captured perfectly the sensation of being bound by desire:

τοῖος γὰρ φιλόπητος ἔρως ὑπὸ καρδίην ἐλυσθɛὶς

πολλὴν κατ’ ἀχλὺν ὀμμάτων ἔχɛυɛν,

κλέψας ἐκ στηθέων ἁπαλὰς ϕρένας.

Such a longing for love, coiling up under my heart,

poured much mist over my eyes,

stealing out of my chest the soft lungs.

The poem opens with τοῖος, a demonstrative pronoun meaning “such,” corresponding to οἷος, “as.” The first line establishes the expectation of an answer which never arrives. The grammatical economy is flawless, down to the perfect positioning of eros coiled in the very center of the line. Six round o vowels and four pairs of clustered consonants build tension through the line as eros rolls itself up in the poet’s heart. When we reach the speaker’s heart, he borrows a participle, ἐλυσθɛὶς, from Homer: coiled in a ball at the feet of Achilles is how Priam offers the body of his son in supplication at the end of the Iliad, and Odysseus escapes the Cyclops coiled in a ball under the belly of a ram. Like Priam and Odysseus, desire’s power lies hidden under a posture of vulnerability, and like Homer, Archilochus sets the participle at the end of the line, quietly casting a shadow of menace over the preceding words.

In the second line, mist rolls down in four nasal consonant streams, -lēn, -lun, -tōn, and -en, another Homeric allusion to the “mist before Achilles’ eyes,” darkening men’s vision in the moments preceding death.

And with the poem’s third line, death takes its toll; lungs torn away, speech impossible, the poem must end. Five serpentine sibilants chase the thief desire, but the poem cuts off before it can complete its meter. What survives of the poem is only fragmentary, and yet its broken nature perfectly captures the effect of eros, stealing the lover’s lungs, cutting off τοῖος as it grasps for οἷος.

Desire gnaws in her slender breast and pain eats out her heart	writes Sappho.
You have snatched the lungs out of my chest and pierced me right through the bones	accuses Archilochus.
You have worn me down	(Alkman 1.77 PMG),
grated me away	(Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen…),
devoured my flesh	(…and Ranae.),
sucked my blood	(Theocritus),
mowed off my genitals	(Archilochus again),
stolen my reasoning mind	(Theognis of Megara).

Desire, the butcher, tears away limbs, eviscerating lovers. The lovers resemble Aristophanes’ fabled race of dual-natured humans, ripped in half by Zeus. “As the pulled root shrieks,” continues Hacker’s Líadan,

as

the struck stone breaks, as

glass at a note-thrust

cracks, as

ice slivers from the sudden shard of spring;

cracked, broken, and slivered, shrieking

under the mad, sharp stars,

I shall dance, beloved,

and sing passion’s reason to the blind walls.

That night, My Closest Friend asked me how we did it. How, just a few months short of today, which marks five years of our marriage — an eternity in twenties-time, when such a span marks half your adulthood — did we still care for each other? For the truth, obvious even to one not operating so deep in the pit of desire as we, is that we do not merely love each other as much as when we first met — when our desire burned its bright, early flame — but moreso every day, a love compounded fresh every morning. How, he wanted to know, had eros’ eternal reach extended across years, despite never closing its grasping fingers?

I can’t guarantee I can remember the exact words I told him that night, and given the saprodelic circumstances I won’t promise that whatever I said rang with the eloquence of Líadan or Hacker. But it was the latter poet speaking through the voice of the former whose words ring in my mind now when I think back on that night.

How did we do it? he asked.

No matter where on this planet our cracked, broken and slivered paths wend, I know we will always look up, dancing, beloved, and singing passion’s reason under the same mad, sharp stars.