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Vive le platonisme! Or, Funeral for A Luna Moth

If beauty has one immutible, intersubjective quality,
is is transience.
Like a lightning bolt from above, it flashes for but an instance in the grand scheme of things,
and then it is gone…

On Friday, I passed it in its sublimity.
Halted in my tracks as if it were a wall.
On Monday, in its place was death, decay, disgust, dread.
I covered my mouth and ran just to trip and fall, to lie there, in that salinity, prostrate, for some time.

Today, I went back.
Even in my abject despair I felt that the outline which held such a delicate quality should be revered, remembered.

I was scared and unprepared, armed with only paper towel and plastic bag, but no one else took notice, and so the task fell to me.
Now there’s dirt under my fingernails…

Could such a thing exist external to finitude?
Only the philosopher knows. If we could just ask him, maybe he would say
there really is an eternal beauty in itself,
up there, and if you’re good, after you leave you can see it.
You’ll sit there smiling, sighing next to Diotima, forever.

Or, she would simply remind us that if it can be lost,
it was never really ours to begin with.