Rubicon Of Love Poem by gershon hepner

RUBICON OF LOVE


Deciding to make love we cross
the Rubicon, but when we stop
and search for others like new ops
for photo shoots we heal the loss.

Like writers who live in the mind
and hotels of the soul, a lover
must put his loving past behind
when it has passed, and run for cover,
because the mind has got as many
rooms as a hotel, and must
leave room for new guests when there’s any
challenge to old love by lust.

Destructive, dissonant and dark,
love turns outsiders to insiders,
until, with quenching of the spark,
insiders turn back to outsiders.

Inspired by Tim Rutten’s review of Edna O’Brien’s “Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life, ” in the LA Times, June 17,2009 (“Mad, bad and simply irresistible”) :

George Gordon Byron, sixth baron of that title, is certainly a poet who stands in that rarefied company, though it's hard to believe that even the linguistic laurels represented by the now commonplace modifier 'Byronic' would have made this protean artist and contradictory - frequently appalling - man content for very long…O'Brien's own attraction to her story's protagonist, which manifests itself in various ways, is obvious. There is, for example, her well known description of Joyce - the artist who looms largest in her inner pantheon - as 'a man of profligate tastes and blatant inconsistencies, ' who 'went from childlike tenderness to a scathing indifference, from craven piety to doubt and rebellion.' Byron, she describes thus: 'Insider and outsider, beautiful and deformed, serious and facetious, ' as well as 'destructive, dazzling, dark and dissonant.' O'Brien once told an interviewer that, as a woman, she was 'attracted to tall, thin good-looking men who have one common denominator. They must be lurking bastards.' Byron - though short, club-footed and inclined to fat - was certainly that latter thing. O'Brien cites Lady Blessington's famous remark that the poet was 'the most extraordinary and terrifying person [she had] ever met, ' as well as the observation of one of his most scandalous married lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, that Byron was 'mad, bad and dangerous to know.'…
Byron seduced a litany of swooning titled ladies, and when he attempted to break off his relationship with Lamb because of public opprobrium, she disguised herself as a page boy and brought to his room a lock of her pubic hair as a sort of calling card. Nothing quite compares, though, to the gothic drama - O'Brien compares his domestic life to something out of Edgar Allan Poe - of Byron's ill-fated marriage. All the while, he carried on an incestuous relationship with his half sister, and when wretched wife and sister were both pregnant, he threatened to move his actress mistress into the home they all shared. On the night his wife gave birth, he roamed the home's galleries, waving the pistols he habitually carried and proclaiming himself 'in hell.' He subsequently threatened wife and child with death. Later, during his Italian exile, when Mary Shelley's stepsister bore him a daughter out of wedlock, he routinely reviled her and ignored the child. Yet this was a man who also composed some of the greatest love letters in our language. In his farewell note to Lamb, for example, he wrote, 'You know I would with pleasure give up all here and all beyond the grave for you.' Writing to his Italian countess, he said, 'Everything depends on you, my life, my honor, my love. To love you is my crossing of the Rubicon and has already decided my fate.' O'Brien has sometimes spoken of how Joyce and William Faulkner are the giants of her imagination and of how she envisions them somewhere drinking together. As she once said, 'Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.' One senses, after finishing 'Byron in Love, ' that, for all his ugly mischief, her hotel now has a room for the consummate romantic as well.

6/17/09