Most marriages made for love have also been arranged by the lovers
For convenience. We mustn’t say so, but it’s true. Repenting
At leisure, later, we try to figure how to raise the whole arrangement
Like an old barn under new roof. Just when we think we understand
Something, we peel off another layer of paint and find complications
Wriggling, our private nest of thriving termites underneath. Anything
To serve love’s swollen, droning royalty, who alone preserve our colony.
We see that there’s something more we’re missing and that we can’t see
Clearly what it is. All convenient arrangements in the name of love,
Or faith, or art, are equally aspirational simulacra of the condition
We hope someday to be in, to have been in. The transformation
May not be miraculous, may begin, but rarely does it complete itself.
Leave off the mind-reading and attend to the movements
And responses of the myriad partnered things. Intertwining
Exchanges and alterations produce a great diversity of wriggling
Differences under the skin of any tranquil scene. We can try.
We can try to change our minds. We can make love
Because love is an art, a faith, a thing that must be made. Once,
We dreamed of being snapped up for a song by a somebody
With an uncontrollable urge to string us along. Artifice. Now,
We have to leave behind the home we then arranged. We may
Yet save ourselves, keep the well-foxed library, dream, but we can’t
Fix love’s twisting, falling beams. And we must share the offspring.
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