What we lost when fall came

It was in the earliest of the summer we realized, life is what you make of it, so we made it ours. There is power in the realization that every cliche quote about “seizing the day” and “not wasting a moment” can be more than typed letters on a multitude of internet cards. We eyed the calendar, picked our passions and began to mold our time into something more fulfilling. Lists were made and adhered to. Last minute trips came together. Spur of the moment indulgences weren’t ignored, they were pursued and conquered. We made tracks in rocky beaches of the lakes and streams of foreign cities. We plowed through fields and interstates that led us to places we had first imagined only days before and they became ours. To the tops of trees and to the wee hours of the morning we left our mundane, completely predictable lives in the dust. We kissed and danced and drove and swam and let loose uncountable fits of laughter and kept moving ahead to what we needed to experience next.

Upon stones shaped like hearts and deep in the heat of summer we came alive to be something more than we knew we were. We played make believe in the bodies of adults that weren’t ready to be so and we only feared the fall. Outlines of our bodies were left in dew covered fields late in the night, imprints of our deepest desires. Under street lights, in cars with wild music blaring, the wind ripping through our hair, we forgot how not to smile. We drank and touched and slept and didn’t slept and then slowly, the days began to get shorter and our thoughts became sharper and we began losing the battle against the sun.

*

And because Love battles

And because love battles
not only in its burning agricultures
but also in the mouth of men and women,
I will finish off by taking the path away
to those who between my chest and your fragrance
want to interpose their obscure plant.

About me, nothing worse
they will tell you, my love,
than what I told you.

I lived in the prairies
before I got to know you
and I did not wait love but I was
laying in wait for and I jumped on the rose.

What more can they tell you?
I am neither good nor bad but a man,
and they will then associate the danger
of my life, which you know
and which with your passion you shared.

And good, this danger
is danger of love, of complete love
for all life,
for all lives,
and if this love brings us
the death and the prisons,
I am sure that your big eyes,
as when I kiss them,
will then close with pride,
into double pride, love,
with your pride and my pride.

But to my ears they will come before
to wear down the tour
of the sweet and hard love which binds us,
and they will say: “The one
you love,
is not a woman for you,
Why do you love her? I think
you could find one more beautiful,
more serious, more deep,
more other, you understand me, look how she’s light,
and what a head she has,
and look at how she dresses,
and etcetera and etcetera”.

And I in these lines say:
Like this I want you, love,
love, Like this I love you,
as you dress
and how your hair lifts up
and how your mouth smiles,
light as the water
of the spring upon the pure stones,
Like this I love you, beloved.

To bread I do not ask to teach me
but only not to lack during every day of life.
I don’t know anything about light, from where
it comes nor where it goes,
I only want the light to light up,
I do not ask to the night
explanations,
I wait for it and it envelops me,
And so you, bread and light
And shadow are.

You came to my life
with what you were bringing,
made
of light and bread and shadow I expected you,
and Like this I need you,
Like this I love you,
and to those who want to hear tomorrow
that which I will not tell them, let them read it here,
and let them back off today because it is early
for these arguments.

Tomorrow we will only give them
a leaf of the tree of our love, a leaf
which will fall on the earth
like if it had been made by our lips
like a kiss which falls
from our invincible heights
to show the fire and the tenderness
of a true love.

Pablo Neruda

we will, come to be.

Perhaps not to be is to be without your being,
without your going, that cuts noon light
like a blue flower, without your passing
later through fog and stones,
without the torch you lift in your hand
that others may not see as golden,
that perhaps no one believed blossomed
the glowing origin of the rose,
without, in the end, your being, your coming
suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life,
blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze:
and it follows that I am, because you are:
it follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we:
and, because of love, you will, I will,
We will, come to be.

Pablo Neruda

I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You

I do not love you, except because I love you,

I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it’s you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood. 

He would not stay for me, and who can wonder

 by A. E. Housman

He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?
  He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,
  And went with half my life about my ways.