And what is this?

(Two companion poems based on an inquiry into the meaning of love)

And what is this?

I

Right away I saw the power of it,
knowing that the loan I made
would never be repaid;
that made me smile—
that secret, quite delicious irony
was mine to keep within my heart.
My sacrifice had just become a gift of love
I didn't even understand.

No loving person would return
remembering, or able to requite;
she acted out of need alone,
a pure divestment of her pride,
and out of need I gave—
not from a love inside,
nor from a hope of heaven,
that pain embraced. It simply
was replaced by mirth.

There is a spring
within the desert's bleak array
that flows with power
to beautify that mendicant
from whom I readily recoil,
and how I thirst!

Love is a sorcerer,
a charmer quite devoid of intellect.
Emotions may be far away,
the strings within a heart untuned
and every day the wind blows cold
across the stony ground—
yet still I smile, a lesser man complete,
beguiled that such a thing as love
has twisted sensibility, and from a tiny throne
far off in space has brought about
a new and wondrous world.

II

I spoke to you of pleasant irony,
of desert springs that burble forth surprises
past refreshment, past all hope of change.
They lurk there, just as patience would,
a gift inside an unexpected dawn.
It just won't do to try to cultivate it;
gifts are like that,
bursting from the flower of love,
and teaching us as water splashes
laughingly upon our faces,
then retreating underneath the sand
as if it never were.

I like that subtle self-removal,
finally to preach without a voice
of all the pure delight when I
am taken from my own
mysterious pathway, cleared
from crevices of latent will
without a struggle from my childish id.
Nothing virtuous in that!

The sand grows dry again,
but still exuberance is there—
a reservoir beneath my feet,
unearned, and like a geyser
driven from creation's power
and its own joyous will.
And we?
We shall not chase it down.
We may not toil
to write it on our hearts.

This thing called love
is but to feast upon
as honored guests, properly oblvious
to any shroud of night.
~