Soon, soon

Revising the wedding I am to perform next week, the sheer simplicity of certain elements of life strikes me. That unfettered awe of our youth that dropped our jaws & stood us up before our futures as if before the gaping cusp of some endless landscape of unimaginable contour, that slow struggle in which our faithful naiveté collides against our impregnable sense of maturation, our endless longings, the thrum & thrill of love & love enduring. It seems suddenly the same thing, drawn out from cradle to coffin, a kind of furious desire that knows not where to lay its head. That we learn along the way is hardly disputable, but that we come to know is something else entire. Love offers us the same wonder that youth did—a comparably powerful ally that we can no more readily define for its enduring presence than we could any of the fleeting moments of our pasts. It is wonder invested, I think; a kind of lineated awe, but awe nonetheless. Right now, I wait for my fiancée to return home from India, & my impatience has begin to intrude upon the most fundamental of my daily endeavors. What to eat for breakfast, if I should walk Willa, when I ought to perform this or that function—the breed of thrill in my veins called to arms by her imminent return feels a good deal like that inexpressible, strangely optimistic visage I beheld so many years ago, in which Dickinsonian Possibility spun like stars around my head. What an extraordinary thing to put one’s heart forward as one’s guide, to let your fingers ungrasp & unclench, to let Reason slip from their grip, & to find yourself ever & anew on that familiar cusp. The liminal! One must embrace it, & in embracing it, know it for the beautiful ghost that it is. Fare forward, writes Eliot. & to walk away from this place, in which ruin hovered in the wings, in which we batted away obstacle after obstacle, will be to walk towards a kind of lightness. The wide world.