Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
Each time it seemed to solve everything.
Each time it solved a great many things
but not everything.
Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and
thoroughly, solved everything.

∆ from Sometimes by Mary Oliver

To see you naked is to recall the Earth

Federico García Lorca, Casida of the Recumbent Woman

When I am feeling depressed and anxious and sullen
all you have to do is take your clothes off
and all is wiped away revealing life’s tenderness

Frank O'Hara, Poem (À la recherche de Gertrude Stein)

Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

I asked the woods this:

How do you want me to love you?

From then on, I just followed that lead. Years before, I’d heard a man, John Lee, talk about the wonder of that question within a human relationship, the good it could do. To no longer crowbar your own sense of how that should look onto another. To actually take a breath and enquire.

⚘ Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass