Love Letters to a Friend, v. IV

Loveletters to a Friend, Vol. IV

Dedicated to and for K.A. La Born

Yes, Yours, My Love, is the right human face...
E. Muir

You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house - and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me.

Streets that I chanced upon, - you had just walked down them and vanished. And, sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence, and startled, gave me back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday ... in the evening.

---R.M. Rilke

And we begin -
every day.

This is my Beloved and my Companion.

II.

"Everything I do, everything I dream, includes you, as wine must taste of its own grapes."
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Husband did not know I was walking up the hill.
I did not know I was walking to meet him.

I was looking.
Desperately.
For God.

And He was there - waiting.

III.

It was a cool night, the beginning of Fall.
Relief from the summer heat.
The earth was tilting
a different direction.

"Imagine the first marriage - a girl and boy trembling with some inchoate need for ceremony - a desire for witness: inventing formality like a wheel or a hoe.

in a lost language in a clearing too far from here - a prophet or prophetess intoned to the lovers who knelt with their hearts cresting like the unnamed ocean thinking - This is True - thinking they will never be alone again, though planets slip in their tracks and fish desert the sea - repeating those magic sounds meaning I do:

On this stone below - this tree - these friends - yes - in body and word - my dark - my dream - my sunsong - yes I do I do."

- P. Meinke

It was his eyes, at first. His eyes. I have never seen such beautiful eyes.

Then his smile. He smiled wide and long and pulled his soul into his whole face to just simply smile. I could do nothing but stand behind my own shadow and watch his magic from afar.

"There's this guy," I said, to a friend. "I've never seen a more beautiful man."

I went to sleep thinking of his eyes, wondering if anything could ever happen to make him think of me just as much, just as late.

Husband married me because I asked him to.

What a sweeping emotion - the overwhelming knowledge that he was my Beloved and my Companion. I could be myself. I could free my soul with this man - something I had never known before with anyone, outside of my best girlfriends.

There have been moments when I have wondered if we have done justice to our gift of finding one another. We know, now, the intimacies that we did not know back then. We know, now, the small cracks in the perfections that we both sought. We know, now, that Perfection never existed; that we must move beyond that ideal and still grow - embrace those flaws - honor one another.

Sometimes, like all lovers who go beyond a beginning, we forget that - to honor one another.

But Husband hopes at morning and I hope at night. Perhaps we will meet in the Twilight.

VI.

Husband can Laugh
and Laugh
and Laugh.

He finds himself
most
amusing....

VII.

Husband has a magical
musical,
mystical ,

Butt.

VIII.

Husband
said
a
prayer
too.

Isn't it a miracle to be the answer to someone's prayer?

IX.

"The voice from the lips to mingle with the winds,
to be lost without an echo ...
Written down, it may continue sounding on,
as from a trumpet tongue,
through all time ...."
- W.C. Fowler