“Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere;
                 They’re in each other all along.”

How can a poet reimagine
what Rumi already wrote
so perfectly?

             How can a man not try 
             to say it, again, for her?

                       *** *** ***

Tonight, we tried to answer
the impossible question: 

             What made you fall in love
                                              with me?

You answered, because you were
                                              different.

& you weren’t wrong, are right, it was
                    because you were different.

But everyone is different, aren’t they?
Every snowflake & all that fluff?

                    A different different, you reply.             

& I understand.
& again
it is enough          

                         *** *** ***

For you.  But I’m not                   
satisfied.  I’m a poet,
dammit, & persnickety.

I run my mind around Rumi.
I try to taste the words
on my tongue, until
they un-dissolve.

I settle for what
the English language
can offer.

I didn’t fall in love with you;
I discovered it. Love
at first sight?  No.

That implies the perfection
of the flesh, the dark depths
of your eyes, the specific shade
of your skin, the lines of your neck
& the blue veins in your wrist,
the course fabric of your hair,
falling ringlets framing grace,
lush energy like an aura–all these
things that are you, but aren’t you, but enough
to force a hormonal reaction—a pheromone
call and response, making me—trip
                                                                  —fall—
                                                                                release–
& relinquish
entire potentials, entire timelines
of a life or thousand more
without a single choice

in our matter.

No—there was not a choice.  But

tt was the slip cover pulled away
from the priceless, antique car,
waiting in an unseen garage
for four decades.

It was Toto biting & yanking
at the Wizard’s pantaloons, until
the whole charade came crashing down
& was revealed.

It was knowing, in that instant,
that everything a lifelong romantic
had sought, had thought
he’d wanted/needed/desired/
was right there—on an old woman’s loveseat
in a lackluster, backwater town

in Ohio.
In Ohio!

& finding it in a shape
he’d never foreseen at all
but was just as necessary
nonetheless.

It was, somehow, seeing
everything & everyone
you’d ever been, ever’d be
in the space of

                                              the breath
                                                hanging
                                             between us.

It was a mirror
to an intricate web
of reality, woven
like a scarlet thread
through the tapestry
of the man I was
or might have been
or still might be
all at once.

It was the skipping stone
taking flight,
sending ripples that reshaped
everything.  

Everything.

It was mathematical.
It was impractical.
It was parenthetical
yet antithetical
in that anything
theoretical
had just become
the ineffable.

It made no sense
that it made total sense

or that, apparently,
it was reciprocal.

                     *** *** *** 

When my mother met you,
hugged you, she cried.

I can’t even

make this up.

                     *** *** ***  

Let’s close with something
that might sound more like honesty
(not extra, as you call me, as you’ll call this):

Rumi said it better.

But he said it
to someone else.

& that’s kind of the point
I’m trying to make.

It was always going to be
a me saying these words
to a you

on a dingy little loveseat
in Lima, Ohio.