When I asked what love was, I heard this reply:
“Love is someone better who makes us cry.
Love is the end before the end—the end in which we die.
Love is the intensity of the melody of the song
So we don’t guess the madness of the lyric is wrong.
Before we die, we sicken, so we have no place to go;
Love is the sick bed for the broken hero.
Love is more than a sore toe,
Love is the soft, deathly, passivity of one,
Once tall and cunning and singing in the sun.”
And the reply went on,
“Love is the good father who is suddenly no more,
His wife a mourner, honorable and poor,
Living in the house of the obedient daughter—
Balancing work, life, poems and horror
Of secret shame—her husband doesn’t love her.
And her handsome father is gone forever;
Hold me mama! I am afraid.
Where is love for the loving maid?
Why is love a jittery drama?
An insult? An ugly trauma?
Does all love begin in ecstatic madness, and end in sorrow?
What can love be, if it dreads tomorrow?”
Tomorrow I will travel to the valley of the bones and ask the Sphinx
What love is. I wonder what she thinks?
