Let's Say You're To Write About Love
For Max and Kaela on Their Wedding Day
Let’s Say You’re to Write About Love
For Max and Kaela on Their Wedding Day
Let’s say you’re to write about love, but you cannot use the words heart or soul.
No fire or ache.
No rose, no kiss, no eternity.
No phrases involving stars, or flowers, or anything that blooms under moonlight.
No eyes or mouths or mountains or seas.
No birds with broken wings.
Nothing that suggests the body is a temple or the beloved a drug.
No rain. No sun. No wind. No weather at all.
You are not allowed to say yours or mine or even ours.
If you write, love is a mirror, the paper curls into smoke.
But you can wonder if love grows the way lichen survives—slow, stubborn, fierce—softening the surface of stone over centuries.
Stone, you can say.
And gravity. And dust. And thread passed hand to hand.
You can say glass and air, yes and no, and the words lightly and between, for your bodies.
You can say sorrow in any language, and sing the word forgive until it makes an instrument of your mouths and echoes over all tho…