Shadow Being
What manner of lover are you being?
You send no flowers, pen no poems, you
speak no gentle words in evening’s shadow
or under starry night. You paint no canvas,
carve no marble—how are you a lover
who never love? But let’s define this thing,
this abstraction called love, this sweetest thing
to artists; is it a state of being,
a state of doing, craft of a lover?
But no, to define the term lover you
must first define love. Is paint on canvas
love, its image, or perhaps some shadow
hint of essence? Does love somehow shadow
cast when strolling by? Is it any thing
that light can touch or pass by? On canvas,
what shade, what tint—blue, yellow, red—being
primary, they must be basic tones. You
would think with all our poetry ‘lover’
to be a well-defined term, one lover
archetype and every other shadow
to ideal. When thinking of love, do you
taste, smell, or sense a particular thing?
There’s no way to test states of being
except by effects, so should we canvass
artists to explain what paints each canvas
in their souls, what makes a person a lover—
Wait! Define love first. No sense in being
strayed by mincing terms; we’ll chase no shadow
lest we follow it to this elusive thing
called love. It’s maddening how sometimes you
know a thing, and yet its truth eludes you—
What mixes with pigments on the canvas
to allude to this mysterious thing?
Some force of sense beguiling the lover
in hypnotic trance to dance with shadow
and light into another self. Being
unique, each experience, each lover
is one thing and also its own shadow;
paint your canvas, lover—love is being.
David M Pitchford
06/06/06: revised 06/11/08
Filed under: Xenoneoclassicist Poetry, classic paintings, creative souls, ekphrasis, love poem, obsessions, poem, poems, poetry, self empowerment, sestina | Tagged: David M Pitchford, essay on love, helen, love poem, paris, sestina, what is love
I very much like the way this ends. All throughout this poem you lead the reader on a slightly dizzying chase as you attempt to define both ‘love’ and ‘lover’ and finally, at the end, the answer is quite simply that “love is being.”
Altogether, quite good.
This also reminds me of a quote by Aesop, one of my favorites: “Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.”