Love Poems, of a sort

Now, after neglecting you after a full month, I will post twice in one day. The reason is this: after feeling crappy and tired all day yesterday, today I felt even MORE crappy and tired, and so decided to stay home from work. Who knows when spare time like this will come upon me again? I figure I better make the most of it.

So what I have to say now is this: two of my dearest friends in all the world just got married the weekend before last, to each other, which I guess is good, in the grand scheme of things. This meant that I got to see a whole bunch of the people I love dearly, but they are gone now, so I am sad. But it also meant that I poured blood, sweat, and many tears into a poem that they asked me to write for their ceremony (the folks getting married, that is) and I wish to share the fruit of my labors with all of you, since now that it is safely written down and read and printed in the bulletin, I feel sufficiently detached to be sort of proud of it. So here you go:

The Ocean and The Dream: A Poem in Two Parts

1. Jeremy

How long does it take
to know that I will always love you?
How can I explain what I am sure of?
It is like knowing
that I will always want to come sit
under the same ribbon-hung tree every day.
To be quiet with her
and write wise thoughts in my book.
It is no philosopher’s certainty, of course.
No, it is much finer than that.

It is seeing the sky
from the bottom of the ocean,
being humbled by my fragility
beneath the weight of all that water
knowing down here that forever
means so little, when I am the one
who says it.

But constancy, my dear,
is not about moving oceans
or whispering sweet nothings
that float to the surface like bubbles
and break your heart when they burst
and are empty.
I have a better promise for you.

I promise that when our two trees grow,
they will bend towards each other
as surely as leaves seek light
branches will entwine with branches
and the deep roots of our lives
will clasp each other
and go still deeper.


2. Alicia

I could almost believe
that we heard the voice
of the road through our sleep,
like the bird song of a siren.
And each of us was lifted
and carried and placed
by the fluid, compelling arms of the night,
so that our thousand mile journey
was made without even breaking
the smooth undulations of sleep-breathing.
And even in that dream,
the landscape had changed,
but I was not amazed.
Wasn’t I set here by chance?
Didn’t stars and planets align
and simply make it so?

But we are not Dante’s children,
waking and lost in the woods.
Remember the day we chose the path?
More than that, remember ourselves as two travelers
who found that at every divergence,
we didn’t want to say goodbye.

And by and by I realized,
the road beneath my feet
was asking me a question:
Who is the one who can paint every flaw
in bright, violent colors
and frame that picture, and still say, “beautiful.”
I answer this question with one of my own:
“How could I have chosen anyone else?”


And, since I can never seem to offer a piece of my own work without also offering some of someone else's which I esteem to be better, here is a gorgeous, blush-worthy poem from the fantastic Pablo Neruda. If I were you, I would make sure to read it sitting down on some soft surface, surrounded by a heaping pile of cushions, as this piece has been known to produce swooning, particularly if you read the original Spanish version, out loud. Ay, Pablo!