Volume > Issue > The Final Match

The Final Match

A POEM

By Lorraine Bochler Eshleman | April 1986

My very breath seems evidence of You.
My pulse throbs with a Spirit not my own.

The warmth within my body is somehow

more than mine,
And life itself seems to be but on loan.

 

And strangely You seem more real than all

The things around that I can see or feel.

The hand that holds the pencil seems
sometimes but a dream,

But You, Whom I can’t touch, complete­ly real.

 

How strange it is to know You, know

You well —

To know You better than the concrete world —

To know You not in logic, but as answer

As if a map had slowly been uncurled.

 

It is a vision of the heart — no eyes

Can see the Phantom Bearer of the map,

But the heart falls down before its unex­pected Guest

And knows that it has met its final match.

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