[image transcription; bolded words represent highlighted passages] “I don’t know when I first encountered Joseph Brodsky’s poem “On Love,” but I know what reawakened my interest in it. I was in Boston looking at the collection of Rothkos at Harvard, and a line from the poem popped into my head—as if the Rothkos had summoned it. It’s a poem about a man who has dreamed about his dead partner. The possibilities that were destroyed by losing her are restored in the dream: the idea of their making love, and having children, and being in each other’s company. It ends by underscoring the commitment that extends beyond mortal life—in a realm that is not conscious, not present here, not material, not cerebral. You might call it the realm of the mystical, or the ineffable. Whatever you want to call it, it’s a realm I believe in. Throughout the poem, Brodsky sets up a contrast between light and darkness. With the lights out, memories of the dream-woman consume the narrator—so much so that she seems to become real. When he flicks the light on, though, she vanishes:

And with the bulb turned on I knew that I was leaving you alone there, in the darkness, in the dream, where calmly you waited till I might return.

Many human transactions take place in this realm of darkness. On unconscious planes, through dreams—even, on some level, in people’s ability to communicate without words. By darkness, I don’t mean black, as in lacking light. I mean dark: the aspect of life that is not accessible through our conscious processes of analysis. The poem’s essence is in this line:

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.