The middle name of love

Never Watch Romeo & Juliet
Before Leaving For Work

There are reasons for this, of course.

If your imprint for true love lies in the viewing
of this film eleven times in the opening weekend,
if the range of altitudes to which a passion
can ascend and descend are thus calibrated
within the malleable tissue of a pulsing boy’s
fifteen year-old virginal heart and are revealed
within the framework of such cinema, then woe
betide you for even considering such a thing.

You see, there is no recovery from this.
There are only swollen eyes filled with
the runny smoke of a scarlet sea that invites
the question upon entering the office door,
“Are you alright?” and the stifled reasons why you
cannot possibly begin to answer with such
a precious truth that no, everything is not alright,
that there are things in both heaven and earth
that remain cherished beyond our small experience
of it, permanently hallowed by the perishable
beauty of such sacred commencements.

As surely as I was a boy in the dark, I fell in love
with love, over and over. I wanted to love like that.
Later, I would learn to want to be loved like that.
Much too later.



I wanted to drink poison. I wanted to bury steel within
my own breast. I wanted to bear the barbed reveille
of a morning lark, to feel its thorny song impale me
again and again as I reluctantly disentangled myself
from the silken webbing of a woven girl’s arms. I wanted
to burn beneath an inconstant moon even as the distance
between love and fire grew wider, less luminous, gradually
more tenuous, until I was again alone in the dark.

I wanted this and dared to believe I would have it.
Had I known it would be thirty-five long years
before it found me, I would have still wanted it.
Waiting is the middle name of love.
In some cases, perhaps even the first.

There are reasons for this, of course.

Joseph Gallo
June 23, 2002