Happy Because We Love

Shadows of trees leaning toward what comes later.

I am taken in by late day bursts of sun rays through the pines. Leaves larger than my hands are beginning to grow heavy in summer's sharpening fold. I lie in the wake, wanting. Shall I roll over and touch the ancestors waiting so very deep?

I no longer wear my mother or my father's mask. Yet there may be at least one more front to dismantle.

I remember taking a bar of Coast soap down to the end of the dock on summer mornings to bath in the lake after swimming laps. Youth's Shangri-la shimmered as the beginning of my love affair with water.

Now, Queen Ann's Lace and roadside chicory. A woman talks to weeds and spends her purse on seeds. Mourning doves with layered coos. This cemetery of summer collects her dead and awaits the autumn haunting.

Farrokhzad writes:

Alas , we are happy and serene.
Alas, we are heartsick and silent.
Happy, because we love.
Heartsick, because love is a curse.

This woman knows the words “I love you” come from a world of futility. The last lover was right: we have no words. Let me be filled with the silence of a wordless stream. But for God's sake, please sit on the banks with me.