LoveLetters - Your Weekly Dating Digest

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. 

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

To be in love

Is to touch with a lighter hand.

In yourself you stretch, you are well.

There is a silk ladder unrolled across the ivy

There is

That leaning over the precipice 

Of the hopeless fusion of your presence and absence 

I have found the secret 

Of loving you

Always for the first time

Like me, love is indeed cannibalism.

Not through the violence of teeth.

But through the sweetness of surrender.

I will surrender myself to you

at the back where we squat 

outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder

at having survived even

this far

we are learning to make fire

Were all stars to disappear or die, 

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total dark sublime, 

Though this might take me a little time.

These are your own words

your way of noticing

and saying plainly

of not turning away

from hurt

you have offered them 

to me    I am only 

giving them back 

if only I could show you

how very useless 

they are not

Do not care if  you bring only your light body.

Would just be so happy to sit at the table

and talk about the menu. Miss you.

Wish we could bet which chilis they’ll put

on the cubes of tofu. Our favorite.

Sometimes green. Sometimes red. Roasted

we always thought. But so cold and fresh.

How did they do it? Wish you could be here

to talk about it like it was so important.

Wish you could. Watched you on the screens

as I was walking, as I was cooking. Wished you

could get out of the hospital. Can’t

bring myself to order our dish and eat it

in the car. Miss you laughing. Miss

you coming in from the cold or one

too many meetings. Laughing. I’ll order

already. I’ll order seven helpings, some

dumplings, those cold yam noodles that you

like. You can come in your light

body or skeleton or be invisible I don’t even

care. Know you have a long way to travel.

Know I don’t even know if it’s long

at all. Wish you could tell me. What

you’re reading. If you’re reading.

Miss you. I’m at the table in the back.

We cannot live, except thus mutually

We alternate, aware or unaware,

The reflex act of life: and when we bear

Our virtue onward most impulsively,

Most full of invocation, and to be

Most instantly compellant, certes, there

We live most life, whoever breathes most air

And counts his dying years by sun and sea.

But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth

Throw out her full force on another soul,

The conscience and the concentration both

Make mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole

And aim consummated, is Love in sooth,

As nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

                                       Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.