Reprise

And day 3...

Reprise
by Deborah Brown

Better than a lover's heart, the immortality of a name.
Love versus Fama, the goddess, with her long purple nails,
her sweeping cloak, her memories of Caesar, Alexander,
the wolves on seven hills.

Even better than love, fame, for as long as there is illness.
I see that if I had discovered Cushing's disease,
I could have named it for myself.
It's hard to maintain desire, that's part of it.

But who first ate a grapefruit or tweezed a splinter
or waved across the pampas at someone else,
initiating the habit of the raised hand?
(If you don't wave two hands, there could still be a weapon.)

They're all forgotten, those heroes.
How much do we know of Cushing, or care?
What about Harvey, before whom our blood
traveled uncharted paths? Or so I was told
in seventh grade. I never wanted fame,
so back to love, the desire for love, the one
that costs everything, that shocks you
when someone else casts a shadow on the map
of the earth for the first time larger than your own.

This poem's a little tough to decipher today...it seems to me to have a couple different meanings. The poem appears to describe a journey of the author's main tenets in life that she sought - first love, then fame, then perhaps desire.

Illness and disease seem to be fairly prevalent in this poem...perhaps the author wishes to convey a sense of weakness to love and fame? To love is to let yourself be susceptible to rejection or hurt or loss; to have fame is fickle, to be constantly worrying about what others think of us and to save face...

Then the author touches on the aspect of names...this I believe is the main theme. A name survives longer than love, or fame, or desire, or diseases. She tells us that names are important clues to telling us about different times in life, different stories of those people for whom the disease or cloak or medical term was named after...The story is carefully hidden by the 'cloak' of the name, a simple yet opaque threshold one must cross to get to the deeper, truer, pure meaning of the word. Each name has a story behind it, and that is what ultimately lasts.

And as each name comes and goes, another is born - in essence, the cycle of life itself. After all, the title of the poem is 'Reprise', which in literature means 'the rewriting of another work', a return or recurrence. Names live forever, but can also be rewritten or repeated.