Four for Just One

1

What use, what reason, can there be
In loving like this, where there is
No certain promise of equal return?
But expressed, written out like this,
The question answers itself – for there is
No use, no reason, in loving at all,
And return doesn’t come into it.

We are not loved – not you, nor I –
In this gift of being, we are simply
Alive in worlds unconcerned with us –
Or less than this, without least knowledge
Of us – and our human love, like mine
For you, for it is that, is perhaps
Our best response to this indifference.

And you – you have become another
Universe – I daily wonder at, dream,
Think on, you – and the joy, the beauty,
The meaning, that I gain in this
Is more than can be seen, experienced,
In the embrace of nature, for love is
Our own creation, our rising into other life.

2

I do not know how to speak the truth
To you – I have no trust in the language
Given me to use – all is timeworn,
Clichéd, perjured – the assertions of every
Would-be lover, the cant of popular culture –
Yet what else is there to reach for
In this pressure for expression?

I have said I love you, in hope that
This greatest of commonalities describes
The exact in my own thought, emotion,
But I doubt the words can carry
What I, and I alone, wish to tell you,
For they are not my own, but are
As cast to and from a ventriloquist’s doll.

Still, I cannot stay silent, but write and
Call with every message of affection,
Care, concern, desire, like an encyclopedia,
A thesaurus, of the love-struck, but perhaps
This is as it must be – every word trapped
In the individual, in time and place – and love,
Freeing us from all these, unable to be told.

3

To say it – to say, I love – say it aloud
To the air, the garden, breakfast table,
A glass of wine, the steering wheel,
To the sparrows splashing in the bird-bath,
Is to unite with the whole, and yet,
Within this, it is to acknowledge – no,
Welcome – the distinction of our being.

None of this – the things out there,
Not you, nor I – are going to last,
Nothing, no-one, has been made
To any transcendent purpose – the idea
Is our own – but in embracing what we know
Of love, that in our loving is all our value,
Merit, dignity, then we truly live.

The chance that introduced you and me,
That has brought you into my heart,
Was as the clearing of all the existent,
All that is contingent, temporary –
Was as a removal of time and its world,
And the coming into place of lives in which
We who are two join an unchanging one.

4

That you have told me now you love me too
Is no statement within the flow of life but
But an alteration in the whole, so that what is
Out there and the self I am within it have
Become divided and, as if loosed from time –
From all the consequence of its passing –
I feel myself freed into another state of being.

Oh, I feel you – my heart beats faster with you,
As when I stop to feel, attempt to comprehend,
The beauty of this you have expressed –
But the bodily has become or seems the least
Of existence enfolding me, and what this is,
In its whole, I struggle to describe, for mind
Cannot bridge at once what is and what is not.

I know in every look and understanding I am
As I ever was, but all this shows is that looks
And understanding – the world we see
And make sense of – do not encompass
The self we are, which via love, and via this
Only – as I know and feel in your love for me –
Can be taken out of time and so perfected.

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