If you love, it must come to this:
Love is autodidactical, and if
Not (and you are not
Prepared), then
Stop.

There is no love that does not need
The knowledge that keeps
The difference between a “held hand and
A chained soul”—touristing through
Another’s life to
Discover, at last, that your arrival may not mean
That you have brought what is good, nor
What is needed, nor even wanted.

Love’s library is of shredded books—half notes,
Stale pages stained with milk and wine;
In the stages of a second thought,
The first book whispers:

“Accidental good is of fleeting value,
And making a virtue of it assumes a risk:
To be as facile as to be false.”

The second book mutters:

“Peaches are sweet and moist, but
Being nice is not being good.”
The third book shouts:

“Love first against these:
Not weakness, but strength;
Not ignorance, but knowledge;
Not emptiness, but the fullness that fills you,
Assuredly.”

Make your skull a helmet for the other’s heart, and
Shake your memory with adult grace;
Forge paths to understanding
With today’s urgency, because
Tomorrow is already passed, unawares.

Sweet lights are gained in fires burning bright;
The decision of too much or not enough is yours to bear.
So take your actions in a manner
That has regard for the manner of the taking; since
The manner and the taking both
Tell what lies beyond wishes,
No matter how well wished they are.

There are things to be seen and heard;
Things that are discussed; and
Things still that must be known—not by
A knowing, which
Bears down upon a fear to reveal a fault—

But by knowing what cannot give itself in knowledge.
Are we each the other’s Haiti, my love?
Endless, endless becoming wrought
By a history of forgetfulness of that
Which makes impossible a day’s routine?

Oh the number of times
We drained a peach upon
Our portents, or lit today’s fire with
Yesterday’s fuel, or
Sang soft soliloquies into
The hollows between us.

But there is nowhere a hospitality for fear, and
We have no right to waste what
We lack the power to welcome.

What we become is delivered by
What we are, and
What we wish to be is an
Ever-closing door.