Orpheus Sings II

1.
Breathing is alternation – of void and plenum, in and out, to be sure, but also of presence and absence, of sameness or abiding and difference or mutation. If we are forced to remain steadily in one of those reciprocal states, we suffocate. Enough people have drowned in tranquil, windless waters; we, affluent denizens of civilized countries with rapidly changing technologies, are more likely to suffocate in incessant change. True disciples of Orpheus, like true disciples of Asclepius, must attend to their spiritual, i.e. pulmonary health.

The first poet I ever met and read was also a medical doctor: Baldomero Fernández Moreno (1886–1950) lived across the street from my house in Buenos Aires and would often stop before our wrought-iron fence to admire Mother’s roses, red, white and yellow. Since he died when I was ten, my memories of his aspect are nebulous, but I remember a good number of his poems by heart. To our times of reckless change he opposed a sweet conservatism:

El tiempo terrible mueve su piqueta...
(Merciless time wields its mattock axe...)

So begins his elegy to his old high school, which was the same as my old high school except mine occupied a new and very different building, which the poet finds insipid, though I found it imposing. In another poem he put it in a sad Alexandrine distich:

La ciudad se transforma, dice alegre la gente;
También lo digo yo: mi tono es diferente.
(The city is changing, people merrily say;
I say the ...