Love for the last time? by Spiros Doikas

[I wrote this in Manchester in 1996 and it is a poem that keeps moving me with the way it captured the eternal Liebestod theme.]

Love for the last time?

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds.
Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

How is it possible to make love for the last time?
How can such mysterious intimacy be dislocated
into such unsuspecting indifference?

(Is it an anachronism of the soul?
A stale acceptance of unreviewed impossibilities?)

But still, how can touch evoke touchlessness?
How can wholeness be dismembered into separateness?
What has intervened between the last time
and the next time that never took place?

An answer, vainly, my mind strove to find
As, somehow, I felt confronted with a mystery

Even more profound than death.