but I'm not a situation that has a solution. i have no definitions. there's just me. and maybe at the end of years you may still feel like you don't exactly know me. but baby you're just wrong. maybe you can't look into my eyes and read my thoughts as plainly as i read yours. maybe i still do things that completely throw you. maybe when you hold me you still feel my body tense in fight or flight. but you know my sleepy eyes. and you know i love jazz when it rains and when it snows. and you feel my body search for yours before it's really awake. and you know that you've crawled and nestled your way into the innermost of my heart and if i attempted to rip you out you would carry a large portion of the mass in your grasping "little" hands. so why, why is this not enough of me for you?

Sappho

as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot-- no, not forgot: were unable to reach

The inward fire eats the soft marrow away, And the internal wound bleeds on in silence. Unlucky Dido, burning, in her madness Roamed through all the city, like a doe Hit by an arrow shot from far away By a shepherd hunting in the Cretan woods-- Hit by surprise, nor could the hunter see His flying steel had fixed itself in her; But though she runs for life through copse and glade The fatal shaft clings to her side. The Aeneid

I have looked into your eyes with my eyes. I have put my heart near your heart. everything that is beautiful, John

Then everything that was, was different, and everything that had been brought a new light. She looked down at her fingers, laced in perfect harmony with his, and watched as the blood trickled down, from her perfect cuticles to the tips, and she knew. beyond knowing. that this reality, she could never believe in. and the words he said would never be truth.

"I know this much, is all," Franny said. "If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything.The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn't have to be a poem, for heaven's sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings--excuse the expression. Like Manlius and Esposito and all those poor men."
~Salinger, Franny and Zooey

this beautiful world

(background: on my run sometimes I'll stop at favored park benches to look at the river/city especially at sundown. Tonight an adorable older man, with a bowtie, sat next to me. His opening line: My wife and I used to sit here nearly every night during the summer at about this time. we eventually got to the following; one of those perfect conversations with a perfect stranger that force you to fall in love with this perfect, even when it doesn't appear to be, world.)

Me: How did you know you were in love?
LovelyOlderMan: There was no other way to know Her. But I think I loved her before I ever even knew I did.
M: Did you ever believe you were in love before?
LOM: I thought I was in love with another. Kind, Sweet, very Pretty--the whole nine yards; we were supposed to get married. Then I saw Her cry.
M:
LOM: I never knew my heart could break so much or hurt so badly.
M:
LOM: 55 years and She stops my heart everytime. (chuckle) and she knows it. I'm wrapped around her little finger. (smile) but I get to hold it too, so it's ok.
M: Do you ever think what if you had stayed with the other girl?
LOM: My life might have been a lot simpler (chuckle). But then... She brings...she brought... Beauty to...everything. No. There would have been no life without Her. No...no life at all.

(maybe it's corny... maybe he's a crazy old man who made the entire thing up. or maybe he just belonged to a different time when life was... just lovelier. Either way, he was wonderful and that moment will remain perfect in my mind forever)