HOW LOVE CAME TO US
Gradually, and working its way slowly, through all things,
beginning even long before we knew each other.
Through emptiness, through aimlessness,
the spirit’s daily wandering in the desert of the familiar,
fed by nights of exhaustion and driven by occasional despair,
by grief, loss compounded upon loss.
Through the patient forbearance of cruelties,
year after year, through folly, through faith and faithlessness,
through half-measures and weakness, through your and my
daily silent supplications and small acts of ordinary magic,
the spontaneous calling out to distant spirits,
each in our separate ways, and for answer the surge of the wind,
the circulation of the sun and the moon,
the churning of the far away oceans
that we each knew and felt in our own blood and breath.
So that when we first saw each other
finally that one July evening at twilight,
it seemed almost as if nothing happened.
A life had already grown up wild around us like a meadow,
was already waiting for us, silent, open.
—from Rattle #22, Winter 2004
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Eric Evans: “I have been interested in poetry almost all my life, since I discovered Gwendolyn Brooks’ In the Mecca in my high school library when I was a teenager. This book was to me a revelation of the true, inner lives of human beings, and of how language, used skillfully, could have the power, i.e. the potential of poetry to say something vital about the human condition.”
