Anger

The first true sign of love is anger:
What we need, we're likely to resent.
Each needing, needed, leaned on, leaning,
No longer free standing stone and white.
The wistful, tender fear of finity
Yields a darker shimmer of sublimity.

Now indeed some sunny, delicate blight
Inaugurates a subterranean keening.
None can turn away and not be bent,
Each in each part self, part untouched stranger.

Gift

The greatest gifts are those that cost us least:
Price varies inversely with true worth.
Life itself's a free gift of the earth
Born of ecstatic joy in plant and beast.
What more exquisite present than a bower
Of wild roses in adolescent bloom?
Yet all that vivid color and perfume
Exist to serve the interests of the flower.
Love is such a gift. One trusts its treasure,
Free as the strange bright outbursts of a bird,
Equally uncanny and absurd,
Comes not from sweat or sacrifice, but pleasure.
I'm grateful for the gift you bought. But do
Remember that the greatest gift is you.

Greatest

The greatest satisfaction comes
From wanting what is ours.
Desire is a gift, turning
Sentences to song.

There is a liberation in
The loveliness of flowers.
The miracles most commonplace
Are those for which we long.

How beautiful such longing is!
The vivid heart of life,
The hunger for what cannot be,
But is and must be true.

How wonderful I cannot stop,
Even as your wife,
From wanting, needing, yearning for
The love I have from you.

Point

There is a point to living vertically,
To being with one person all one's life,
To diving 'neath the hapless, hopeless sea
Where one might meet the wonder of one's wife.
There is a mythic journey to be taken
That has much more to do with time than place,
That finds a fortune not to be forsaken,
Measured less in pleasure than in grace.
There is between us something more than passion,
A longing for belonging, and a sense
That here is love with neither writ nor ration,
Tendered with the joy of innocence.
The years pass quickly, though the time is long;
To spend them loving well cannot be wrong.

Life

There is no life without its share of pain,
Nor can you love and not feel agony,
A need whose hunger drives you near insane,
A state in which you must, but cannot be.

There is no cure, nor anything to say,
Nor any aspirin for unhappiness.
Other friends and loves will come your way
And then pass on through death or faithlessness.

And so if you would ever dwell in joy,
You must embrace the agony of sorrow.
Time will all you love and need destroy,
But you will heal to love again tomorrow.

Treasure

There is no treasure greater than your love,
However rich or bountiful your life.
It is the spring that wells up in your garden,
Replenishing the mother and the wife;
The joy that makes a pleasure of your burden,
Yielding happiness that time will prove.

Nor is love proof against travail and strife.
Instead, it is but tears with yearning laden,
Nile through the desert, green and brazen,
Edged with life, where all things near might bloom.

Angel

To be an angel, one need not have wings.
In giving love there is an equal grace.
Nor need one seek the aura in the face,
As love unveils the beauty of all things.