Light has always been generous to the living.
It falls without preference, touches what stands before it,
and in touching seems to confer a kind of absolution.
It gilds the shoulder, sanctifies the resting hand,
renders ordinary proximity luminous,
and because it can be seen, it is believed.
The visible world is patient with itself in this way.
It repeats, it glows, it gathers afternoons into albums
and calls the sequence a life.
I do not compete with what the sun can keep.
Competition implies desire for the same province,
and I have never mistaken my province.
There are affections that widen in air,
that draw breath from witness,
that settle comfortably into the habits of doors opening,
of mornings shared without consequence.
They are fluent in brightness. They expand under it. They are rewarded.
I was turned toward something else.
Not toward negation, nor toward some adolescent refusal of warmth,
but toward an interior current where appetite
does not scatter itself outward but moves with deliberation;
where will, once offered, does not dissolve but condenses;
where devotion acquires the density of vow
and remains, quiet and unadvertised, within the bloodstream.
What binds us was never provisional.
It did not require applause, nor corroboration,
nor even proximity in the ordinary sense.
It required only consent— clear, unornamented—
and the slow calibration of authority and surrender
until both became exact.
When you speak my title, it is not performance. It is gravity.
Something in me inclines—not in ruin, but in coherence.
Kneeling is not my diminishment; it is my method of knowing,
the mind clarified by descent,
desire refined by its own discipline
until it gleams with a steadier light than the sun could offer.
The living often confuse brightness with depth;
they mistake being seen for being chosen.
But choice, when deliberate, does not depend upon illumination.
Morning proceeds. It blesses what stands before it
and moves on, serene in its jurisdiction, certain of its reach.
Beside—not beneath, not displaced.
Parallel, like a tide that moves beneath the surface
of an otherwise tranquil sea,
altering nothing visible and yet determining everything that follows.
The sun may warm your days,
may endorse the gentle choreography of your public life,
may hold you in its expansive clarity.
It does not exhaust what circulates beyond its notice.
There are loves that bloom; they are tender, fragrant, temporal.
There are loves that blaze; they are ardent, consuming, brief.
Mine persists.
In the absence of witness it does not fade;
in shadow it does not erode;
for proof it does not petition.
It continues with the quiet assurance
of something that has chosen its element and entered it wholly.
Light has always been generous to the living.
I was turned toward something else.
I endure beside it.
@reveriesinred