trinity

It is not that I really love her anymore.

It is that the connection between us
-the slender, silken thread that was my lifeline,
the incandescent electric arc that gave me light and warmth-
was itself the third person in the relationship.

And it is the death of that third person that I am grieving.

communion

"Loneliness does not come from being alone, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important." -Carl Jung

(w)holy

"And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.

Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side by side and to say to them, ‘What do you people want of one another?’ They would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: ‘Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another’s company? For if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two—I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?’—there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need.

And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love."

Plato, Symposium

The Eclipse

"As long as we were in love, we understood each other. There was nothing to understand.” L’eclisse (1962)

father's day

She never lay in bed with me, and looked at my hands.

I woke this morning, feeling the soreness of cuts incurred from a week of carpentry. As I examined them, noting the stiffness and calluses, I recalled how she never lingered with me in bed, studying the details of my fingers . She did mention at least three times through the years that I had appealing, handsome hands. But she never held them, committing their details to memory. Of course, such acts cannot be demanded, but are born only of wonder, and love.

She never let me touch her face. Not with my own face, or with my hands.
She said it would cause blemishes.

She used to be a little hurt that I never did a drawing of her, though that complaint eventually ceased. But she forgets the one that I did that first autumn, as she sat nude, assembling a puzzle on the dining room table. I sat behind her, adoring the contours of her 23 year old form, flawless as a sailboat hull. In love with the exquisite line that flowed from the nape of her neck to fall over her shoulder, tracing with the graphite it's subtleties down her torso to her hip.

I soon learned of course, even in that first year, that those curves would never really be mine.

And so, eventually, I gave up studying them.

Adam

They say that the woman was taken from a wound in Adam's side.
If this is true, then all Adams have such wounds.
I know that this is true, because I have such a wound.

Longer than most, it runs from the top of my scalp down the length of my torso, slicing open my right inner thigh,
and terminating somewhere below the knee, on the face of my shin.

Deeper than most, it penetrates to bone,
the slowly thumping box containing my soul, mute in vivisection.


They say that god closed up the wound afterward.
but this is not true.
I know that this is not true, because my wound has never closed,
and remains a moist, sensitive, bloody gash.

Both a hemorrhage and a portal.
Not unlike a woman's bloody gash.