Sing to Me

Recently several of my friends have fallen in love and rather quickly been broken by it. Utterly torn apart by feelings they don't understand nor will ever be able to reason through. One repeats to herself how stupid she is, while the other has committed to being the first Methodist nun.

Joe and I both have nightmares of the other leaving or falling out of love or cheating. In my dreams I scream and scream at Joe and at everyone, and no one gives a hoot for all my hollering. It's terrifying. I told my friend about these dreams. She thought that they couldn't be the sign of a good relationship, that there wasn't enough trust or something. I told her it had nothing to do with trust, that these terrifying dreams had no hold in actual events, no sensibility to them. When you put all of yourself into one fallible being - your hope and your future - you rely on that one person's love for everything, which means everything is at stake. How much love and joy does it take to balance the inevitable sorrow that follows the act of giving yourself up? The extent of my love and my neediness terrify me. And my dreams are full of sorrow. And life is beautiful for it.

In the words of C.S. Lewis:
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation."
So Lewis is a little over the top, but can see what he's saying.

In response to my friends' sorrow, I wrote them a poem. It is a rough draft, a love poem from the perspective of a future boyfriend. From my own perspective because I love them both.

Before She Sang to Me

Again, through the fluttering leaves of a tree,
the light plays her toes
like fingers fluttering upon a piano,
like a spell becoming,
like the being of my dreams materializing
in the late afternoon.

I am distracted from my game of solitaire
by thin skin covering blue veins,
by a broken blue toenail
that is caused by the weight of being human,
by the curving calluses I am anxious to touch
lest they explode in an opus released,
a concerto that is roaming wildly in my fingertips.

I could watch the light play her 'til dusk,
then, perhaps,
she'd allow me a turn,
a touch,
a beautiful sound for her to make.

For within one foot, she holds the wisdom
of an ancient upright, salted lightly with dust,
and the majesty of a Steinway grand
on a white marble stage,
the light from the stained glass windows
reflecting a myriad of colors across the concert hall,
and I, as I pause a few paces away,
wish with ache, like all non-musicians,
that I could play the piano.

How we cause wildfires

On the other side
Of that mountain
You will find nothing
But everything the earth was
Before you.