To Love
What does it mean to love?
To believe in another person’s existence
Enough to bend;
In the intricate painting of a life,
To let another’s colors and brush strokes
Reshape, re-imagine your own –
What does it mean,
When picnics in the shade of the apple tree
Are never perfect like in love songs,
When there are worms in the apples
And it hurts your ankles to sit like that on the ground
But you both smile anyway and lift your glasses to toast
Until a sudden frustration,
Half-meant joke,
Changes the scene: the smiling toasts become arguments,
bickering – or maybe
The arguments were always there
And the smiles too
Like those old hologram pictures
Two images always present
And only perspective reveals one at a time.
What does it mean to love,
And what does it mean to grow together
Like moss and branches,
What does it mean to dance by a Christmas tree
And hold hands that gradually become more and more
wrinkled,
What does it mean
When your life’s painting and that of your lover
Grow to have the same palette
Grow to be two pictures of the same place
But looking different directions
The stream that begins in your painting
Continuing in your lover’s –
What does it mean
To strip away the protective layers and to be vulnerable,
soft,
But only to one person;
To respond to another’s seasons
Like trees respond to the tilting earth
Leaves budding, growing, dying, falling – and simultaneously
To be the seasons to which another’s leaves respond –
What does it mean?
“Arise, my love, my
fair one, and come away;
For now the winter
is past, the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear
on the earth;
The time of singing
has come,
And the voice of
the turtledove is heard in our land...
Arise, my love, my
fair one, and come away.”
(The quote at the end is from Song of Solomon 2:10-13.)
