I read somewhere that names
Fix things in place like pins
And that to be nameless is to be
Free.
There are some things in this world which can’t be spoken
Can’t be captured
Can’t be named.
As artists,
As human beings,
They call us
An unstoppable force
An indefinable drive
Onward-
That deep tug in the center of your chest
The gnawing need to create.
They are things we chase
Things we aspire to
Things we even worship sometimes
Writing long into the night
Carving wood and clay and bone
On our knees in the dark
Smearing paint, desperate to understand
Desperate to make something
Half as beautiful as what we
Feel.
Since we awoke as a race
We have created
In service of only that drive
Only that obsession
Half awe and half hubris
Half joy and half shame
Half triumph and half
Defeat-
The expression of something
Inexpressible
The naming of something
Too sacred for language.
We know we can never arrive
We can only
Search
And the search is the reason
For our cities and our novels and our symphonies
An aching search
A humble search
A sweet journey whose end-
No matter how much we pretend otherwise-
Is only
Death.
You are like that.
I’ve tried for hundreds of pages
To explain myself
To express my love and longing but
You
Are like a thousand of those unnameable things.
I think you might be
Made of them
Somehow.
I think they live in your skin and your bones and the timbre of your voice.
I can write all day
About the magnetic beauty I see in you
About the way you make me feel
And list the things I love about you
But it always feels
Insufficient
Always as if I am writing around something
Bigger
Something with no words to describe it-
None that even
Come close.
As if I can only write about what you do
Not what you are
Because what you are is too vast
For thought.
I write as though I have pressed my hands to glass
Trying to sing to you through it
But you are on
The other side-
Even the most beautiful art
Even the sweetest music
Even the most tender poetry
Could not pierce deeply enough
Would be a disservice and a reduction
Would fall hopelessly short
Of what you really are
And how you really move me.
I try to tell you why I love you
I try to tell you
How.
I know you wonder sometimes
I know you wonder if I only love
Things about you
Things I could find in others.
I try to explain but it’s like
My thoughts catch in my throat
And fall like shadows on the floor-
So hopelessly inadequate.
I search and search
I sit up nights
Trying to find the words
Trying to make the words
But there are none
Not because you are ordinary but because you are
Unnameable.
What I love in you is deeper than reason
Deeper than touch
Deeper than ideas or memories or the little moments when I stop and gaze at you
Transfixed.
I love you in a way that reminds me
That we are not just flesh and blood
Because if we were there would be a word for what in me
Falls to its knees at your feet
And what in you
Makes me want to build things with my hands
And never stop
And that is
Maddeningly
All I can say
Because although I think by now I may have truly tried
Them all,
There’s not.