The pursuit begins! Infatuation’s flame, crackling in the night,
burns in the daytime, sooting shadows underneath the eyes –
a new hunger hollows out the cheeks, concern for health now slight;
breathing, now, in novel rhythms, the deep inrush that slowly dies.
One wonders what whim caused that bluebird of happiness to alight
on the shoulder of one who will tell, and believe, all lies.

If only thinly veiling truth would produce the end we seek
or overlooking of deceitfulness allow us to tend that cheek!

How did the magic begin – what combination of elemental things,
with what divine catalyst, and in what degree and order
produced that which is larger than the sum of human feelings
and conceives, in a Creation of evolutionary disorder,
impulses that invade the heart as gently as a host of Vikings,
from which siege there is no defending the unwalled border.

It is this mystery and puzzle that the burning heart on fire would know –
what sparked love’s flame and what wind if fanning the essential glow?

From a dust cloud in the black cold void, coalesced a heart of rock
which, from the inward pull of cramping gravity, felt the heat
of Union, and came together as one gem in the astronomical clock
when Time was young and Olympian gods not one heroic feat
had even dreamed of, though all was pregnant in universal wedlock,
requiring separation’s legitimization into one vast living heartbeat.

Love melts everything, red lava cools, crystallizing variegated stone,
applying massive pressure until finally the gemstone’s light is known.