Dimensions of Love
Love has the power to touch every part of your life – every part of your being. This poem is woven around this theme.
No matter how brutal or beset with fear, love, if only for fleeting moments, reaches beyond oneself and includes. Your body and mine merge. You and I have extended beyond the narrow boundary of ourselves and dared to want another person, to need, to admit we are not self contained. Clumsy as it may be, lovers want, offer, take, give. Without love, there would only be containment, isolating and isolated . There would be no need to take in what a lover offers, there would be no absorbing and growing from the infinite richness of another being’s difference.
Am I the cell that swims toward my lover’s waiting egg? Am I the egg, wondrous and radiating with life, waiting my lover’s treasure? If I am these, and this is love, then in our embrace, in our passion for each other we burst asunder, and all the million years of compact life we carry is given to each other. We die, to give, and form new life. We leave ourselves behind to reach toward a miracle. Mystery and wonder incarnate and are made real in our commonplace. A child has come.
Am I a baby and mother, bound to each other intensely with potent needs, prompted by fears and passions? Baby or mother, breast or mouth, my yearning sucking squirting love, is still the same old mystery. Still body to body. Still wet and penetrating and absorbing and nourishing. Still full of needs met and shared. Still calling us to break open and admit our need for each other, to feel the longing of another for us – calling me as the mother to give myself, to feel something, somebody beyond myself – to take in who and what they are and know their difference – calling me as baby to know that I will die without YOU – that I will shout with all I am to hold you and suck you into me – that everything I have is yours – and I must grow to see another being than I exists and calls me to relate and take their very soul and body into me that I might grow.
As a youth, love takes hold of me and in its urgency grows courage in me to move beyond my parents and expose my vulnerable self to a stranger. Love teaches me, if I am brave enough, to leave behind all that was safe in home and family. With persistence beyond believing it stretches me toward caring for this stranger, absorbing their behaviour, satisfying their needs, toward becoming more than I was. As difficult, as fraught with pain and anger, as open to pettiness, yet love carries on leading us toward bursting asunder to take in another being and become more.
To make love is to face all that we fear, all that we hold of past pain in us, all that we store as the most ancient secret of ourselves and of life, all that is beyond our little self to know, all the rivers of creation and joy, all dying and rebirth. To be penetrated, to penetrate, to fall through each other into our past, into the place of genesis, the Garden of Eden, the wonder, the sin, the fear, the hope – the transcendence. To hold each other – to look upon each other – to touch – to kiss – to linger in each others arms, open to each other – and this in a world so guarded and suspicious and at war. Can there be anything more wonderful or strange? Can there be any greater promise of a future for us? Can there be anything more physical, more spiritual, more ordinarily beyond?
To fuck, to shag, to have it away with each other, as common as this may seem, has in it the power to transcend beyond anything else in our small lives. Vast differences in age are leapt over by the drive to sex. Skin colour, political differences, religious intolerance, gender opposition, intellectual variation, age, culture, class, distance, time – all melt before sex. Not religion, not philosophy, not police, not war, have done so much to bring people together, to show them how to live and learn from each other, to prove how much they need beyond themselves.
Sexual love, the drive toward parenthood, the drive toward giving body and soul to another being, the drive toward facing more pain, more heartache, more challenge, more dependence, more responsibility than you have ever faced before. Sex, the drive toward the tenderness of holding and nurturing an infant. Sexual love, the energy that fires one to work day in, week long, year after year to provide. Sexual wonder, the teacher that opens eyes to see all natures creatures building homes, feeding their young, striving, giving themselves, dying, to bring life – that links us with others through understanding. Sexual togetherness, that moves beyond parenthood to slowly absorbing you into me until I am enriched and made more. Sex, where you and I are wet with each other, shining eyes, smiles, sharing sweetness and wordless wisdom that runs out into the lives of others.
Tony Crisp
Copyright ©2001 Tony Crisp