LOVE


Love
Oh, Love
I want to know you
and
Even more
I want to understand

I want to hold you
At the center of my palm
And see your eyes in the full
Light of day

Love,
Oh Love
Explain why you are so elusive
The shadow in favor of light
Why must we run in search of you
And why
Must you turn your face?

Copyright, 2003. Angel V. Shannon

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.....Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to A Young Poet

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _


My poem is not yet finished. There is more I need to say. But I need to wait until the questions themselves become the locked rooms, books written in a very foreign language. Right now, I cannot love the question. I can only manage this deep state of misunderstanding.

A few days ago a friend called and said she had to get on the road. Her voice was light but troubled, the voice that people have when something terrible has happened that is far out of their control. That heaviness that says, "I don't like this, but I can't change it and so I'm doing my best to accept it." She had to travel to the funeral of a friend who had been brutally murdered. The facts are too familiar. A young woman, once in love, seperated from her husband. An accomplished couple. He: an attorney. She: a teacher and graduate from a well known, well respected historically black college. A marriage that failed. A separation that hurt. He called her out to talk. Words turned into arrows and arrows into eyes on the wrong side of a shotgun. He broke her teeth. He broke her ribs. His fist left two circles around her eyes the color of ink. He made her beg for her life. And then he simply left.

She went to the authorities to obtain the Necessary. The paperwork that is handed off to the policeman on desk duty given the charge of typing and filing. The rookie. The one who longs for the day that he will strap a weapon to his side and be a Real Policeman. The paperwork that never amounts to much and never has. The man was called up on charges and let go, of course, on his own recog. She moved in with her parents; she went home to the daddy that she knew would protect her. Intelligent parents. Well prepared for retirement. Living the way that we all should hope. A week later she went out for fresh evening air. He saw her with a man that was only a friend. A man that understood the need to talk. He became angry. He went to her father's house when he knew she'd be home. He knocked on the door. He shot her. Her father tried to jump in the way to save his only daughter. He shot him too. A father was rushed to the trauma unit. A daughter was taken to the morgue. And a man, perhaps wounded by rejection, looked in the rearview mirror and saw the authorities coming for him, then shot and killed himself.

At poetry last night, I read the beginnings of this poem and I also read another, dedicated to this couple whose names I cannot write. I want to know about this thing we call Love.

It would be easy to just call this a Domestic Violence incident. But I have grown weary of these useless titles that give us no insight and worse, no conclusions. I have grown weary of attaching simple titles that make the facts sit easier on the palate. I want an all-inclusive understanding and I want to examine this thing in the full light. I want to sit down at a table and pass this thing around. I want perspective.

On the surface it is easy: a man gone wild. But the careful eye sees the layers and sees the true prism responsible for the play of colors. There is the issue of the transitory state of life and of love; there is the issue of love itself and how, at least in this country, we are socialized into the useless and destructive notion that when two are married they become one. Useless because not only is it impossible to become one, it is also tragic. As the poet Khalil Gibran says of marriage: let there be space in your togetherness. There is the issue of assumed ownership; the notion that perhaps played out in his mind "if I can't have you, nobody will." There is the issue of men, unable and often unwilling, to face their anger that in due time only transforms into rage. There is the issue of how men are socialized in the first place, from very young ages, to deny their true feelings; to objectify the world in which they live. There is the issue of how we humans look for solutions; I, too, have been guilty of looking for permanent solutions to transitory situations. He chose a permanent solution to a transitory situation.

Is life much more than a transitory state?

In time, with the therapy he certainly could have afforded, the pain would have lessened and each would have gone on to live. Perhaps they would have fell in love again, with different people, and became grandparents or great grandparents. Perhaps one of them would have discovered the cure for AIDS. Perhaps as an attorney, he could have saved thousands of men on the line -- men like Mumia Abu Jamal -- for crimes they didn't commit. Perhaps, as a teacher, she could have knocked out illiteracy in a third world country. Perhaps, but much too late for that now. At issue too, is dominance as we see it played out as far away as Iraq and no doubt, in this man's mind, as he gained some unthinkable pleasure from having the wife he once loved, beg for her life. And certainly, at issue is the language itself and the philosophical underpinnings: Domestic Violence. Domestic? As opposed to "In the Street Violence?" The language that translates, simply, to "this is a quarrel between lovers, we shall let them work it out." Nothing more than that. Domestic?

But at the heart of it all is Love and how it changes. Where does it go? And how does it get there? Who is to say what Love is and isn't? And isn't indeed a tenuous line between Love and Hate? What happened to their Love? Where did it go? And how did it get there?

This is what is pouring forth from my heart and into my notebook. I cannot, yet, love the questions. I simply cannot.

Be Good,
ANGEL