When Love is All
A life of prose that wasn’t fine enough to become a poem.
Part 1: Childhood is a short, good day.
As a child, I looked forward to such evenings, sprinkled with laughter, angled and leaning in through the lattice fence outside my bedroom window, forming diamonds of light on the wall. I remember those diamonds differently now, as people vanished from my childhood. They shine still. Coming into my teens, I was unsure how I would create myself, standing so often mid-stream, balanced on stones, thumbs in belt loops, believing I was it; nothing was impossible; so young and so naïve, I could create God.
I knew very little of the rigorous purpose of life. I had the strength of a sixteen-year-old and, with it all, the tenacity, and there was never a moment to think about becoming an old man with a runny nose who shivers on summer nights.
I believed in voyages and dreams, endless and immense, across the darkness of midnights, unafraid. I dreamed of vast meadows of love, where shining herds beyond stone walls gathered in barns untouched in centuries. There was no time for prayerbooks, churches, and steeples, only long stretches of aching tenderness.
Through my teens, still not looking back, my head was turned. My heart was taken, my life given, and my dreams became her dreams. I never understood the language of kisses until I was embraced in a luminous path of fiery stars.
What did I know of fate? This thing that eats your poetry. One day, you’re standing in his room, fate, nothing more than a bolt of lightning, and the pages of your past are burned until all that is left are the ashes of what once was. There is no protest. Fate stands there calmly and quietly and puts his hand on your shoulder. His eyes are explicit. Churches loom, spires ring mournfully, calling you a non-believer, and you hide in one of the confessionals, and it is there you let go, voyages, dreams, and love as vast as meadows.
Verses are said, but my lips were stitched together.
What do I care anymore about the noise of the world and the sound of the streams running by? I lean my head into my hands, heavy with sleep, listening to my heartbeat and believing it impossible.
Coming:
Part Two: Storms of Wrath
Another by Harry Hogg:
Two children are friends, but one is betrayed… or is he? Read The Letter.
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