And what is Love? -- It is a doll dress'd up
For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle;
A thing of soft misnomers, so divine
That silly youth doth think to make itself
Divine by loving, and so goes on
Yawning and doating a whole summer long,
Till Miss's comb is made a pearl tiara,
And common Wellingtons turn Romeo boots;
Till Cleopatra lives at Number Seven,
And Anthony resides in Brunswick Square.
- John Keats
All the rivers of this world
exist for two reasons: to give back our faces
in motion
and to cool away the disparity
between what we expect humans to be
and what we are as human beings.
There is no cave. There are no shadow images.
There is no glory of seeing the sun for the first time,
but only pure blindness -- our eyes grew voracious
and schlepped all the sun had to give into
the retina -- the truth is not hidden:
The truth had been with us since the garden,
yet we chose to be so close to it; we chose
to hold Truth a separate entity, and not to eat from it.
We locked ourselves in the soft cages
and gulped down the keys. We are the captors.
We forged Truth into an abstract notion --
an idea impossible to grasp in its entirety;
something that occurs to us whenever
the sun shows itself between two buildings,
or the cards we were dealt with frozen features
echo the inside of our faces --
There is no pursuit of truth. We sit across
the table from It, and that which fixes
us to the other side of the table, that which
we've eaten from, sealed our throats
and our gazes: an omerta of sewn steel.
Listen: can you hear it breathing; that something
about the waves dancing agleam, that
breeze that takes you back to the
cornfields and Spanish moss trees of home,
that hum inherent in everything in motion
in the universe, and the universe itself?
Take my hand, and let us return
to the mountains like the first children of God,
move up up up and bathe
under the Aegean winter sun
while we can still see the birds
flying and wincing above us
like the corners of the storm the come.
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