What the Heart Learns by Looking
Love arrives like weather, changing the color of everything it touches.
There are mornings
when the world does not begin
with light, exactly,
but with a remembering.
The grass, still silver
with the night’s last tenderness,
leans toward the sun
as if it had been waiting
for a name.
The birds begin their small,
urgent sermons
from the hidden rooms of the trees,
and everywhere the air
is being given back
to itself.
This is how I think of you.
Not as one thing
placed beside the world,
but as the way the world
becomes more deeply itself
when I am loving you.
The river does not explain
why it shines.
The field does not ask
to be praised.
The wildflower, opening
its brief and fearless face,
does not know
how much courage it gives
to the passerby.
And yet I have learned
from all of them
how love moves.
Quietly.
Completely.
Without asking permission
of the guarded heart.
It enters the eye first,
then the breath,
then the places in the body
where sorrow had made
a little home.
Soon, even the ordinary things
begin to tremble
with invitation.
A cup on the table.
A door left open.
Your voice in another room.
The sky gathering itself
into evening.
I used to think beauty
was something the world offered
from time to time,
like a coin found in the road
or a bird crossing suddenly
through a window of blue.
Now I think beauty
is what love teaches us
to recognize.
It was there all along,
standing in the doorway
of each hour,
waiting for us
to become less defended.
So when I say
that I love you,
I mean something larger
than longing,
though longing is there.
I mean the earth
has become more articulate.
I mean the clouds
have begun to carry messages.
I mean the trees,
with their patient green hands,
keep showing me
how to reach
without possessing.
I mean the world,
which I had too often
mistaken for scenery,
has become
a living address.
And you, somehow,
are part of that address.
Not the whole of it.
Love is not a cage
for the infinite.
But a window, perhaps.
A lamp.
A path through the field
where the deer have passed
before dawn.
A way of seeing
that makes the soul
want to kneel
and rise
at the same time.
There are evenings
when the last light
rests on the branches
like a blessing
it has not yet decided
to withdraw.
In that hour
I understand almost nothing,
which is sometimes
the beginning of wisdom.
Only this:
that to love
is to be changed
in one’s seeing,
and to be seen
by what is beautiful
is to be asked, gently,
to become worthy
of the gift.