Love is Like Itself

Oh, Henry, you are such a silly and delightful man. If I were twenty years older, I would be knocking on your door and bringing you my best baking, tempting you to a lonely-heart solution for a widow and a widower.”

There it was. Just like that, an amorphous notion of a special bond with Kate, and Henry’s undeniable warm affection for her was suddenly held up to a light. And something about Kate’s free-spirited admission of interest in him, delivered in the same laughing breath alongside a caveat for their near three decades’ difference in age, was at once a kind of relief and at the same time a kind of hurt. Though Molly was dead, he still harbored a devotion to her memory that would be awkward at best to reconcile in a relationship with another woman. Molly’s ghost was surely with Henry, and he found the haunting pleasant and a comfort. He believed he required nothing more than sincere and close friendship with women such as … Kate.

“What is love like, Henry?”

“It seems so awfully complicated and not at all straightforward,” opined Kate. “I love you one way, Henry, and I loved my husband another, and I feel something unlike either for Walter. What is love like, Henry?”

There was not an iota of hesitation as Henry sat on another stump and began to quote a poem he had written for Thomas when Thomas had asked the same question of his father after his first serious relationship went on the rocks. “Love is like itself: undivided, outside of time; the sense behind the seasons, whose circle needs no line.” Then he paused to say what he was reciting. “I wrote this for my son. May I continue?”

“Yes, please do, Henry,” Kate said, sounding a bit desperate. “Start again. Will you?”

Henry recited:

Love is like itself:
Undivided, outside of time;
The sense behind the seasons,
Whose circle needs no line.

Love is like itself:
Counting one as all;
Each moment in eternity
Rising upon the fall.

Love is like itself:
Without degrees or kind;
Unknown to “this, not that”
And seeing all while blind.

Love is like itself:
True without polarity;
A pointer on its balance staff
In perfect singularity.

Kate sat and stared at Henry as though a bird had flown down and sat upon his head. Henry looked at the ground, at his dirty toes, and found tears brimming in his eyes. He would not look up when she got up and came to stand in front of him. She bent and kissed his bare head, a light touch of her lips like the caress of soft wind from a bird’s wing taking flight. Kate walked away, and Henry did not move for a long time until the sawyer found his way back and said, “They’ll break yer heart in a thousand pieces, won’t they, old man?”

“They will,” Henry said. “And it is indeed a rare privilege. Once is not enough.”

Taken from The Poet of Tolstoy Park by Sonny Brewer.