In Love In 7 Words
for D.B.A.

i.
she makes me do what
she makes me do things
I wouldn't do normally

she brings out of me
me I wouldn't be normally

I like where and I like how
she makes me turn

a different self because of her
it amounts to happiness
minute by minute
and day after day

track I'm on, I'm in love
trust it, trust in it

pork chop and cheese cake
what she ate yesterday

ways she'd say, I'm in love
or I love you

without hardly ever
saying it actually

she'een like me
in love like me

but i' is me
who does say
who dus sing

I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you

she does it,
says it differently
says it otherwise

I'd hear it, hear her
closer to her
than anyone I know

sweetest of relationships
and I am in some
sweet ones

with poets, priests, painters
other artists

she is poet, friend, scholar
we are lovers
after a fashion
if not actually

almost 60, she's almost 20

love, what a big big mystery
to tie us thus
to tie us up
to free us

ii.
she is a stranger
in comparison to this girl I love
this girl I have

how it is she is like family,
like kin to me

joined to me like another limb
grow from me like hair and nails
like air out of my lungs
like blood in my veins

something organic
about how we are joined

unable to or difficult to
join with who is as if
of another species

iii.
how happy I am
and how helpless

a million miles from hopeless

I know not where
this love comes from

I know I'm in its embrace
don't know where
the next thing's coming from

but I know that where
this love, so pure, so strong
came from

everything else will as well
able to send such joy
such sweetness

anything can be sent down

iv.
Lord,
wherever health comes from
send me some and take away
the fear of illness, of death

she makes me want to live
and to be well

greater joy to be alive
I have not ever known
or have hardly ever known

I am unable to marry her
because of age
or is love, because eternal

not dependent, not limited
by the 38 years between us

who, I wonder, would marry us
would Bishop Boyd or Angela
or Keith
or the Dean of The Cathedral

v.
how far can we go God
my sweet pickle and me

in school still
in love with me
as I am or almost

and I am hopelessly in love
got it bad
as bad as I've ever had it

how many steps
can we together take
oh God, how far together
can we go

hope we do not go
like Charles Dickens
and Ellen Lawless Ternan,
younger than him by 27 years

long after he had passed, she confessed
I so loathed the old man's touch

hope she finds my touch
sweet sweet

how impossible it seems
the possibility of marriage

I know I'd be prepared
to protect her with my life
wherever on earth we were

what of her having children
and getting an education

would not want her sacrificing
fullest intellectual potential

maybe if we went
and lived in Poland
in some such place

she'd not have to sacrifice
being poet, being published

can even win the Nobel Prize
like Wisława Szymborska

vi.
she likes my singing
must take her with me
to Evensong
let her hear me
sing the responses
during Divine Praises:

"Blessed be God!
and what follows

vii,
thought I was getting married
find I'm hopelessly in love

the situation of your struggles
weighs heavily upon my heart,
she says

I am a vessel upon the water
rough or smooth seas
I let myself glide
or be pitched
or be tossed

wind and water
the bosses of my days
of my ways

I am wooing her
with thoughts, with words,
with poems without end

a line of verse
I extend and extend

verse of mine of her
about her like love vine

how it wraps about her
she wraps about me

embrace I cherish
more than any possession
I have in this world

to her I can give up
can give over
all my worldly goods
can share these with her
without a second thought


© Obediah Michael Smith, 2010
Written between 1 p.m. and 3:03 p.m.
April 2, 2010, during Good Friday Service
at St. Margaret’s Church,
while Rev. Angela Palacious
preached on the Seven Last Words.