Whether you're in the midst of your heydey or many seasons beyond, how are you holding in memory such wordless moments?
In Edna St. Vincent Millay's Sonnet XLIII we are brought into the poignance of a life's winter. Even on this bright spring day in California, this lovely poem --and Alva's song inspired by it -- tugs me to lean back into my dappled remembrance of marathon foreplay, fleeting peaks, and languid lingering close together after the lightening and thunder.
To vividly visualize (if that word can mean all forms of sensory imagination and recall) is to create space in one's life. To be able to cultivate a reliably positive attitude about past and future lovemaking in all its guises is to grant oneself space in which to savor a glance, a touch, a loving word, an embrace. In this spacious meadow of grace and pleasure, one is subject and object, giver and receiver, chaste and carnal, eternal and fleeting.
Memories of loss, pain and unrequited love are not hereby vanquished. A moment of pure connection, of union tender or passionate, is a precious pebble tossed to the middle of a quiet woodland pond. Feel the ripples without end, lapping over and again, up along the shores of your here and now, always gently reminding you of who you ever are and will be, alone yet together in love.
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
Edna St Vincent Millay