Here is how it began.
The central passion of my life.
You spoke.
I was dazzled.
I held back.
But I could not stay away.
We were surrounded by others.
Yet we spoke privately.
Technology created a relationship
Curiously medieval in tone.
A chevalier who courts his lady from afar
Without a trace of physicality.
Experiencing this assault on the senses
Was akin to traveling from the pristine
Isolation of my soul’s snowy pine forest
To some opulent Oriental bazaar.
You voiced knowledge of a sensuality
I had held back: fire in a shell of sensibility.
I dreamed of your stature.
The elegance of your long, slender limbs.
I felt you must possess a candid stare
I knew it would be penetrating.
I prayed it would let me in.
Where we might find common ground.
So I’d resigned myself.
Our relations had to remain
As such and for the time being.
But could they sustain this remove yet devotion?
We were water. We
were inlets and islands.
We needed to flow and ebb at each other’s land.
Dear Professor of Desire.
A man who does not need to swagger his confidence.
Few have known as well as I the discrete
Difference between profane and sacred love.
All restraints fleeing my body
As I unfurled into a sail and wind
That transported us
To regions I had never traveled before.
I think of the soft hair on the nape of your neck
And it seems an impossible thing to me.
I heard your voice and felt your breath.
I heard your heart on top of mine.
It seems the vastest and saddest miracle of my life.
I touched your hair.
What wisdom is there for me
To focus on the gravity of love?
I feel unmoored
So floating in the void.
I’ve lost the love-weight
That had anchored me for all of those years.
In my loss, I often wonder
Why I left my rocks.
Why I turned from the snowy pines.
Was it not to give up hope?
I would not have had as much joy
But I would have avoided much pain.
I know now that any relation I ever had was meaningful to me
Built on the rope of hope, however mistaken.
