In the depth of the snowbound hours of winter
In the private of my stolen-alone hours of silence
In the heart of all forgotten, phantom cosmonauts
I find images of you. With twinges of fear, I confess: What if we never had met?
What if Gabriel? What if Gretta?
What if I’d never read them in Joyce? Never his ‘Dubliners’? Never read Linda Gregg?
I think of that nighttime, with Gabriel in their room
Their hotel room watching Gretta while she sleeps. Snow falling outside, slowly.
A night to their own, Bessie looking after the children.
I feel the slow ebb of passion, his mid-marriage, amorous desires for her
Dissolved in the wistful tears of her innocent tale shortly before
Of a frail, teenage admirer who gave up his life pining for her. His wife. Now.
His surprise to think she’d tucked away for so long a romance so early in her life.
A man (seventeen) had died for her sake. Surely.
That one profoundly poignant moment when he gazes on her face
Finding her yet quite beautiful, but certainly no longer the face her lover braved death for.
I feel for that moment. I feel Gabriel’s sorrowful envy. Bitterly, from the other side.
The realization that he had never felt like that towards any woman and never would.
Tears of love’s lost opportunity gathering more thickly in Gabriel’s eyes.
What, in God’s name, is love? Not sex.
Sex is the fabric, the passion love can be sewn from.
But it doesn’t sew itself. Nor deny a love that realms beyond it.
If I could write despair of love like Joyce
Or falling snow
Or never having opened the umbrella of one’s heart
Would London ever care to publish again?
One more Dubliner, one less busker. And who would miss my songs?
If I could capture those holy moments when first we fall naked into hungered arms.
Really, what greater gift? What heavier burden? What Gabriel? What Gretta? What loss?
The fervor one might let his life fall loose for
With courage
Would London’s blue lips ever care to breathe out another line?
And who would know my sorrow?
I feel I’m not the cause of what I see
Nor even a reflection of it on me.
I once had this occasional dream
As the Earth, its occasional war
That I would leave a verse to change the world.
But nobody knows my name. Or my pride.
And morning comes soon enough as Monday.
The one you imagine reading this, does she know?
For a person to love someone beyond love is, perhaps, the most difficult of all endeavors.
There’s a loss in the night.
There’s a pain in the dark when you put yourself into something not yours to have in this world. When you prefer to be back on Earth, not cut adrift, floating forever in space.