A Journal Of Thoughts

I knew it the first of the summer,
I knew it the same at the end,
That you and your love were plighted,
But couldn’t you be my friend?
Couldn’t we sit in the twilight,
Couldn’t we walk on the shore
With only a pleasant friendship
To bind us, and nothing more?

There was not a word of folly
Spoken between us two,
Though we lingered oft in the garden
Till the roses were wet with dew.
We touched on a thousand subjects—
The moon and the worlds above,—
And our talk was tinctured with science,
And everything else, save love.

A wholly Platonic friendship
You said I had proven to you
Could bind a man and a woman
The whole long season through,
With never a thought of flirting,
Though both were in their youth
What would you have said, my lady,
If you had known the truth!

What would you have done, I wonder,
Had I gone on my knees to you
And told you my passionate story,
There in the dusk and the dew?
My burning, burdensome story,
Hidden and hushed so long—
My story of hopeless loving—
Say, would you have thought it wrong?

But I fought with my heart and conquered,
I hid my wound from sight;
You were going away in the morning,
And I said a calm good-night.
But now when I sit in the twilight,
Or when I walk by the sea
That friendship, quite Platonic,
Comes surging over me.

And a passionate longing fills me
For the roses, the dusk, the dew;
For the beautiful summer vanished,
For the moonlight walks—and you.

I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love — put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.

To be in love and to say nothing about it – this seems to me the most elegant (and perhaps the only sensible) form of romantic attachment. It’s a sentiment poetry and music only occasionally address – the best pop song on this theme is The Band’s “It Makes No Difference” with the great line, “Now there’s no love as true as the love that dies untold” – but Walter Raleigh’s “The Silent Lover” keeps its own counsel even more eloquently.

I

Passions are likened best to floods and streams:
The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb;
So, when affections yield discourse, it seems
The bottom is but shallow whence they come.
They that are rich in words, in words discover
That they are poor in that which makes a lover.

II

Wrong not, sweet empress of my heart,
The merit of true passion,
With thinking that he feels no smart,
That sues for no compassion;

Since, if my plaints serve not to approve
The conquest of thy beauty,
It comes not from defect of love,
But from excess of duty.

For, knowing that I sue to serve 
A saint of such perfection,
As all desire, but none deserve,
A place in her affection,

I rather choose to want relief
Than venture the revealing;
Where glory recommends the grief,
Despair distrusts the healing.

Thus those desires that aim too high
For any mortal lover,
When reason cannot make them die,
Discretion doth them cover.

Yet, when discretion doth bereave
The plaints that they should utter,
Then thy discretion may perceive
That silence is a suitor.

Silence in love bewrays more woe
Than words, though ne’er so witty:
A beggar that is dumb, you know,
May challenge double pity.

Then wrong not, dearest to my heart,
My true, though secret, passion:
He smarteth most that hides his smart,
And sues for no compassion.

Tempted and twenty
and lighter than air
We were limitless then
but then I didn’t care
‘cause the river still ran
at the end of your street
and the earth didn’t turn
unless churned by our feet

Before I feared flying
and you fell from grace
there was something like hope
in the look on your face
when you showed me your scars
and I showed you my lines
and the blood turned to ink
down the length of your spine

But my second-hand heart
and your third-person views
wore the shine from our souls
and the soles from our shoes
‘til the world wouldn’t wait
and the river ran dry
and each hollow I love you
came out a goodbye

And I’ve written you young
frozen happy and free
just one more pretty crack
in my glass memory
And I’ve written me honest
still lonely and scared
We were limitless then
but then I didn’t care

If we must be memories
moments carved out of time
by careless blades indifferent
to wounds they leave behind
let us be of golden days
and hearthside autumn nights
of eyes that caught each flame
and robbed it of its living light

If we must be whispers
along empty midnight halls
faded smiles in gilded frames
to line their somber walls
let our breath then find the weight
of words we left unsaid
and send them forth as warnings
to the sleeping from the dead

If we must be monuments
down cemetery paths
poets, lovers, harbingers
reduced to epitaph
let no marble letter
stand a sad regret betrayed
If we must be memories
let us be yet unmade

(Source: victim-of-convenience)

As I grow older, I sometime sit and reflect, on those meaningful moments of my youth, and of those passionate and at times lustful encounters, and wonder why they lasted but a moment in time.

Perhaps it was a need that simply needed to be filled, of youthful and ranging hormones, and yet not all of those moments were confined, too indiscretions of youth.

I ask myself, were they simply lustful interludes, or were they meaningful encounters that enriched my life?  A capsulated moment filled with passion love, and understanding, and yet not quit a relationship, and if pricked or torn quickly evaporates, and those intimate words whispered only moments ago, drown in a sea of recrimination.

And yet I wouldn’t give up a moment of those brief encounters, for those meaningful affairs of the heart, with all of it’s ranging passions and lustful interludes as given me insight, into my own soul, and a better understanding of what a true relationship should be, in that it can never be judged within the momentary glow of a candle, or within the sweet taste of wine, and it should never be confused with a whispered word of passion, or the lustful moan of lovemaking.

For those are simply wonderful distractions, snapshots, that in time will quickly fade, like the dawning of a day with its magnificent

sunrise. It’s the residue of those moments, within those brief encounters that shape our understanding of how a true relationship should be, they are the guideposts to a more meaningful encounter, and without them we cannot judge, we cannot discriminate, and by their very nature they simply run their course, in an awkward moment that quickly ends… as if it never was.