This Love, So Long Ago

So, last night I was looking around for my missing flash drive. My wife had kindly advised me, some time back, that I should back up all the files on my laptop, just in case. She's that kind of a girl. It is not only the computers that get backed up, but also soaps, and deodorants, and toothpaste, and toothbrushes, and air freshener, and shampoo, and . . . well, you name it, it's backed up. Except for the toilet, that is, because we have backup Liquid Plumber.

Unfortunately, however, these flash drives are rather small, and they have a way of wandering about when you're not looking. Kind of like socks.

In any case, I was looking here and there in all the likely, and some of the unlikely, places for this flash drive when I discovered an old floppy disk drive--the portable kind that you plug into a USB port. Remember portable floppy drives?

Lo and behold, there was also a floppy disk in the floppy drive (neither of which, as anyone knows, is floppy).

Hm, what could this be? I cannot have seen it for at least 5 years. Why, this is not a floppy drive at all--it's a time machine!

Forgetting the hopelessly elusive flash drive, I brought instead the portable floppy one to my laptop and plugged it in.

What went ye out into the wilderness for to see? A reed shaken with the wind?

What popped up on the screen, rather stubbornly so, dragging little floppy feet, were some twenty files, in the old Word Perfect, of poetry. Yes, these were love poems to the woman who got away.

And more than that--they were multiple little windows opening onto a time, so alive, so vital then, that has slowly faded over the years like red sheets which have hung too long in the sun. Here was the record of life as it was, the fullness of hope, the sadness of dissolution. Here the heart of a younger man, questioning, falling, fighting, dreaming.

My God I was in love with that girl. Or at least with who she seemed to be. Or at least with what I myself might one day be.

Yet that is still not right, there was something else--the thing that is lacking, the face of desire, the freedom which beckons--for freedom itself is a female thing, and the wind to which poems are always addressed.

Were you there,
there to meet me,
tall leaves trembling,
black hair shimmering,
seeming touching,
soft lips meeting
underneath the oak last night,
and did it seem
in sun we swayed
just like the oak leaves
overhead
and was your skin
like satin then
(or was this in another dream?)
Did you know
as much of me
as what you offered
willingly,
or truly lay
between my knees,
your summer hue
receiving me?
Will you come now,
come with me,
in our bed
of oak tree leaves?

I remember that when I wrote those words, I had not even met her yet--and yet it somehow seemed I had. It was like that--as if not knowing the flesh, our spirits fed on passion alone, sharing beforehand what flesh could not, and never would.

You breathed in me
I came alive
You said rise up
I did arise
You made me new
a rib of you
gave back the gifted kiss,
and held for me
in muted time
within your bosom
sleeping rhyme
hushed beyond
a graceful finger
faithful to the day
when lips would part
impress on mine
the breath that was
revived in me,
You breathed essential poetry,
my soul did live again

Such were the awakenings of that summer and autumn, in the year 2004. Reality, in hindsight, could only have paled when placed beside such passions.

And straightway one of them ran, and took a sponge, and filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink (Matt 27:48)

Life can be bitter nectar indeed.

My Mama Done Told Me

Love is lovelier
the second time around;
Just as wonderful
with both feet on the ground . . .
--Sinatra (along with whoever wrote the song)

Aside from being lovelier the second time around, love has also a greater degree of sanity on repetition, which makes it not only better, but safer, especially from an MS point of view--for I am convinced that love (and divorce and sorrow and bitterness) made a significant, if not preeminent, contribution to the flash frying of my brain some three years ago.

I guess that's what happens when you play with fire . . . and there is a certain sort of love that burns just as surely, just as deeply, and scars just as permanently.

My mama done told me, when I wasn't knee high . . .

How much of love, what percentage of love, was actually lunacy, I cannot say. It was all mixed up together, a perfect tangle of passion and prudence, confidence and fear, tenderness and harshness.

My mama done told me, son . . .

I guess the simple way to say it, minus the music and lyrics, is that practice makes a difference, and experience pays out in wisdom (or at least patience, which is the next best thing). It pays also to seek a partner who has passed as well through the same sort of mill (sorry guys, no virgins here).

A woman will sweet talk, and give you the big eye, but when her sweet talkin's done . . .

At the same time, there are lovers in this world who continually seek the same sort of madness that killed things the first time around, mistaking passion for meaning, intensity for content. Tricked by love, they enter into the same uneven, unworkable contracts, Love becomes an opiate, a narcotic, a magic potion, promising a beanstalk to the heavens, yet delivering the same old bed of weeds in the end.

A woman's a two-face, a worrisome thing who'll leave you to sing the blues in the night . . .

In a world full of ironies, and with a disease which thrives on the same, I thank my lucky stars, once again, for the affliction that is too tired to tolerate trouble, too wise to mistake a cliff for a curbing, too experienced to imagine that the searing coals are merely colorful twinkle lights.

Love's more comfortable
the second time you fall . . .

And I suppose it's even better the third and the fourth . . . .