["Something I learned about agape when I was young..."]

Something I learned about agape when I was young: the Iliad tells us fellow-feeling is finite in communities. Brotherly love becomes a number that has to be divided among persons—so if you’re too kind to others, that might explain your neighbor’s graft. I sometimes wonder if perception is the same; if the quantity of percepts, or our trove of eidetic things, is not limitless but rather constant: the measure, say, of a sunlit field. So if we dip like deep-sea divers to the world, we’ll have to use a purse-seine to sieve our sense impressions. We’re hoarding the image at our peril. That bluest scilla smeared by a finger writing in the grass? Endangered. Poetry’s work is not to ravish, but diminish.