CALL ME BELOVED

Your inquiry was forwarded to me –
our department handles those questions
of more existential caliber, and yours
has fallen into my eager and open hands.

I must confess, it’s been quite difficult
to nail down this “love” concept, after all
humanity has had it’s best people chipping
away these past 6,000 years and so far we’re

still just scraping against the very skin of it.
I’m but a humble clerk; this feels inadequate.
But here’s what I can leave you with, figures
to hang your ruminations onto, late at night –

Love lasts longer than the sunset and well past
the certain sunrise, longer than seasons bleeding,
calendar pages falling like autumn leaves gathering
into impossible innumerable breathtaking mounds –

well past rosy childhoods, past silly little crushes
and the parking lot breakups, stripping bare at
midnight on the beach, dorm rooms, backseats –
lasts longer than scars, longer than crows-feet –

longer than the marriage, past the eulogies and
dull echoes of sobbing sitting at the wake, longer
than grief that guts you, hollows you out empty
and retching, shivering like flu, longer than that –

love is something we get to scrape up against.
Nobody can hold it, or place it soft into your arms –
no, love is the sun, it rages hotter and brighter and
longer than our brief, childish hearts understand –

you find it when you hug. That space between bodies,
what gathers in the valley between two heartbeats –
it’s gravity will always pull us in. Inevitable, immense;
love lasts longer than I could try to explain, endures

past when humanity’s best and brightest will give up
chipping at the skin of it. I’ve tried to tuck it into
these lines, letter writer – question asker, love seeker,
lingering lonely and doubtful in the cold of night –

yes, love lasts longer than the night terrors –
longer than the heartbreak, than longing,
than humanity’s wreckage of poetry, music,
longer than we all deserve, maybe, but still
it lasts. It lasts.