Lovers don’t meet anywhere. They live inside each other. —Rumi
Once there was a longing for you so strong
I could not be away from you for long.
I cursed the time away from you;
I was nourished in your intoxicating presence;
Having hungered my whole life for a love like this,
I fed on you like the hungriest animal
And grew mad for more and more of you
And to reach you, wrote you many a poem and song.
You were Isolde to my Tristan: passion
Fighting pride, that, even as sweet hunger all our passion won,
Sought honor even in the feeding, our rage
A kind of lust, wings of love stretching in a cage
As secrecy and homelessness cursed our kisses
Even as our love rejoiced in love which the simple eye of the public misses.
Wanton yet proud, your beauty burned like fate in my eye,
My destiny to consume myself as you desired me, in poetry,
Until things like time and place and “when and where will I see you”
Began to weary us, for the love given was never the kind that will do;
Our love had to fight for every inch of ground
Which by reproving public vigilance is drowned.
Exiled every moment, always thinking how and when and where to go,
We’d look at each other helplessly: yes, my love, I know.
Where can we love? Where can love that wants to love go?
There was not a crack in the world we could fit through,
Obligations to worlds and shadows and worlds is all we knew
And our love lay helplessly stretched upon
One shadowy bed; life—which conspires against love—won.
We should have been together constantly,
Harmony chasing routine inside ecstasy,
So love, building with love, not absence,
In constant delight, might have a chance.
The wrong endured became the thing sought,
More absence to aid desire, or so we thought:
I will make her miss me, I shall stay away.
Love! What is it? What shall it do or say?
Until the horror of staying away too long
Became its own prophecy.
Love dying, we did something wrong.
Now a sword lies between Tristan and Isolde.
Eternal love has surrendered to the dying world.
You look away, you cannot look at me,
It is not because you do not want to look at me.
It is only the passion and the pride
Of Tristan and Isolde. Tristan and Isolde have died.
Love is reborn in the love which Rumi
Knew as the highest of all.
There is no end. There is no wall.
