Let’s, briefly, presuppose you hadn’t fled,<\/p>\n
Hadn’t frozen in the headlights of my interest,<\/p>\n
Then dashed off, in your maidenly discomfort,<\/p>\n
Seeking the river, turning into this laurel.<\/p>\n
Let’s briefly imagine, as I kiss the trembling<\/p>\n
Bark of your arboreal mutation,<\/p>\n
That we’d spoken, at the dinner I’d proposed,<\/p>\n
Of mutual constraints and all life’s ironies.<\/p>\n
I might have called you Merline, as Rilke called<\/p>\n
His artist muse, young Baladine;<\/p>\n
I might have spoken of the Duino Elegies<\/p>\n
And how the Earth’s transformed. Let’s just imagine.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This article was originally published in the June 2021 edition (vol. 121) of <\/em>Australian Rationalist.<\/strong><\/p>\n Photo by Eugene Triguba on Unsplash<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Let’s, briefly, presuppose you hadn’t fled, Hadn’t frozen in the headlights of my interest, Then dashed off, in your maidenly<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":10490,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[660],"coauthors":[151],"class_list":["post-10157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry-art-humour","tag-poetry"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10157"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10586,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10157\/revisions\/10586"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10157"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=10157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}