Have I lived long enough to know
that love does not arrive, it reveals?
Not the ambush of the young heart
but the slow parting of a veil
we did not know was there
until the light came through.

In the middle of the road of this life
I found what Dante found,
not comfort, not arrival,
but the dark wood opening
into something vast enough
to hold all I had been
and all I had not yet become.

This is what love is at the age of knowing:
not the having, but in equal measure being had,
unmade and remade by a presence
where the known became a question
and the unknown became home.

I loved the Beloved the way a man loves
when he has already loved and lost
and loved again and lost again
and still, still, said yes.
Not in spite of what I knew
but because of it.

Because I knew by then
that love is not a destination
two people reach together.
It is the quality of attention
you bring to another soul.
The willingness to be changed.
The courage to be seen.

And in the seeing,
in the three seconds before morning
when the Beloved's face still holds the room,
I understand what all the sunsets,
all the oceans, all the years of searching
had been quietly seeking to tell me: