West Wind

1

If there is life after earth-life will come with me? Even then? Since we're bound to be something, why not together? Imagine!...

2

You are young. So you know everything... But, listen to me... Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart's little intelligence, and listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied...

3

And the speck of my heart, in my shed of flesh and bone, began to sing out, the way the sun would sing if the sun could sing, if light had a mouth and a tongue, if the sky had a throat, if god wasn't just an idea but shoulders and a spine, gathered from everywhere, even the most distant planets, blazing up?...

7

And what did you think love would be like? A summer day? The brambles in their places, and the long stretches of mud? Flowers in every field, in every garden, with their soft beaks and their pastel shoulders? ...In one room after another, the lovers meet, quarrel, sicken, break apart, cry out. One or two leap from windows. Most simply lean, exhausted, their thin arms on the sill. they have done all that they could. The golden eagle, that lives not far from here, has perhaps a thousand tiny feathers flowing from the back of its head, each one shaped like an infinitely small but perfect spear.

Mary speaks to her lover here perhaps after some disappointing scuffle, asking her/him to consider that love is not just a flower, but a spear of beauty. Love is not for us to put into a box but is the god of the open waters that is merciless to the rowboat of our lives. Perhaps as humans there is no way we cannot give up on love simply because we tire of the constant struggle, of the constant rows and fights we have with those with whom we have found disappointment in love. I mourn the number of times I have considered that love should be a garden, when I see litter cluttering up a relationship. And so I tire of picking up the trash, and my love drifts away. We humans fight like lice upon a bird - the lice of the left wing say my way is correct, and the lice of the right wing say no my way is correct. In the meantime, the eagle soars on. Perhaps I'll do some gliding today, tomorrow, and all the days to come so that I may rest with an open heart, ready not for a row, but to row.

Is there anything that is not a paradox?