In our vista, love argues with nature.
The long look begins with you.
Everything that belongs to a view
Begins with your eyes—a looking which love longs to look at, too.
Love begins with a looking heart,
And if the view expands, and love gets as far as art,
Love resembles those paintings which fulfill
Every standard of beauty, they are so beautiful.
To be caught in paintings,
Framed by the foreground’s overhanging leaves,
Green and brown undulant hills in the background—
Would you like to be in a Van Gogh painting?
Is a love a love which always has to be?
Always spies the eye which this vista found?
Even as identity is a sameness which grieves?
If love must be love, which always must be,
So the lover can always know you—
Half-way between here and there,
He will always be late as he comes past each door.
And there: far in the distance are smudges: the poor
Who live poorly, and do not love anymore.
