“If Time and Space, as sages say,
Are things which cannot be,
The sun which does not feel decay
No greater is than we.
So why, Love, should we ever pray
To live a century?
The butterfly that lives a day
Has lived eternity.
The flowers I gave thee when the dew
Was trembling on the vine,
Were withered ere the wild bee flew
To suck the eglantine,
So let us haste to pluck anew
Nor mourn to see them pine,
And though our days of love be few
Yet let them be divine.”
Susan Dane
We look for strong arms
to carry us. None forthcoming.
Or they come and go and
leave us more depleted in the going.
We look to find ourselves in the other,
always turning ’round the other
in pink taffeta, little girl pirouettes,
all grown up and still
twirling for him, as if some coyness
could suffice the long road.
We are built with space inside,
but confuse the space for emptiness,
then mad that no one, no thing, can fill it for us,
we stomp away. If the other can’t be all,
we’ll be all ourselves, we say.
Come up empty once again.
Then banging around, high on hype,
insisting the world be round
the way we have been promised.
One day we finally stop.
Stem and petal bruised.
The grace of time is in its always
coming. Each moment undefined,
but now becoming. Pounding
pavements in the driving rain,
alone, a new mercy takes shape:
Life neither round nor square, love sought
neither here nor there, but every blossom
of its own unfolding. Here sun does not
eclipse the moon, nor being with one’s self
dismiss the other. Intimacy of a new order
untangles the pronouns.
In the clear blue we are no longer different.
Which is not to say
we are the same.