MSB, I think you may have misunderstood me. I don't think love IS lust, I just think long romantic relationships where you can maintain both are really special and rare. I think that is what most of us strive for, and I wonder if it is really attainable.
It is quite possible to have lust totally without love, and love totally without lust. Things start with lust, and become love!! There is a stage in long romances where two people can become one, or become parts of the other so much that the magnetism, the differences, that attracted them one to the other, are subdued and finally lost. Can two people become very close and keep the freshness of the attraction? Can they still long for each other?
Perhaps it is really an argument in the realm of quantum mechanics.
This is a poem about a long relationship. I think it is a really nice poem, but am wondering whether the poet is expressing feelings of confinement at the same time the familiarity, the oneness are comforting to him. What do other people think about all of this?
The Anniversary
It was your smell that, for a day after, I carried with me.
My body smelled not of me but of you. The train
ticked over its crossings, stopped. In all its noises
I heard, suddenly and bewilderingly, your voice.
That was six years ago, the damp riverbank,
the Midwest storms massed, raining like an indictment,
the attacks of telephones, old interruptions talking.
Out of that, at your voice, I came to this different world.
Now, with the formal furniture, the black puppy quietly
lying at the door, the flames of the candles steady,
we are held by our reflections in the rose-colored wine--
a civilization of agrements, a closed place.
Thousands of miles away, the summer storms
still race in their green light. The night trains hurry on
across Canada, their noise empty of voices.
The old telephones busy themselves with the old words.
Here, in the Pacific evening, the puppy stands up
suddenly in the doorway and barks toward the dark street,
protecting what has come to include him. Six years, now.
I cannot tell his voice from the room's voice.
I cannot tell your voice from my own voice.
William Dickey |
