Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

Romance begins with anticipation, ripens with limited time, stolen moments, languid looks broken by shyness, making us turn away before hungrily returning. Poetry, too, requires mere snippets of time and space.

A poem, a song, a romance – none can last the full length of our longings. Any attempt to write page after page in metaphor, to sing line after line in aria, to live day after day in love – any attempt to capture and hold still the ephemeral moments, to grasp them in our hands and hold tight, leaves us with tiny little nothings in our palms when we open our fingers.

Within the expansiveness of the moment-that-cannot-last, we composed our poetry. Brushing lips, roaming hands, probing tongues, hopes seeping out of our pores and evaporating under the moonlight, improbable dreams raining down like a piñata’s shiny pennies and hard candies, released after blindly striking time and time again, delightfully bursting and smashing through our outer layers.

Poetry requires the searing edge of something magnificent ending too soon.

Poetry requires things so flimsy and metaphysical they elude the grasp of hands, let alone minds.

Alas, this is not poetry – it’s an anniversary. A relational D.C. al fine – guiding us to return to the beginning and play the stanzas again, all the way through to the end. Our time together includes romance and poetry and music and prose and sagas, full sections I’ve wished the Great Author would have spared us, as we have stumbled sometimes under the weight of unnecessary words, defensive explanations, the sheer attempt to hide what we could not say in volumes and volumes of what we never meant to say, clichés that make our teeth hurt, predictable scenes that disappoint both writer and reader every time.

This is the stuff of marriage, not poetry:

We have struck blindly at the air, hoping to release the sweetness hanging just outside our grasp. We have flailed and wearied in our flailings, coming close to resignation, to giving up, until we reach down somewhere deeper and persevere. Oh the reward when we hit it just right, pennies and candies and kisses and laughter falling on our heads. Another little poem, our familiar duets, our choreographed moves through the kitchen, laundry room, bedroom. And yes, predictable refrains of harmonic tension. We have the expanse of time with which to come around, again and again, to meet one another, relive the joy in finding again the one I used to long for.

Never like the first time. Never like strangers, the buzz of the illicit, the adrenaline of stolen moments, the shyness and fear that kept us from looking at each other for the first time. Never again to find you for the very first time after wondering if I’d ever be found.

That’s the stuff of poetry.

After the finding, the keeping of love requires something other than – more than – poetry.

Happy Anniversary, Darling.