A WHOLE GREAT LOVE—A LETTER-POEM CELEBRATING ITS BEGINNING

The date below tells where and when this letter-poem was finished and mailed before the Internet.

Readers, whoever you may be, I wish this Whole Great Love may be established in your life.

February 21, 1993
From Austin, Texas to Brisbane, Queensland

For Katharine, My Life, Soon To Be My Wife

My Dearest Sunshine, My Beautiful Fact of How the World Works,

This is my letter of love to you, for you, of you. If I die before you, you will have these words to come to as my world and while I am alive may they refresh you about my intentions.

I am speaking to you now and for the length of my life about our love for each other and for this life which is now ours together.

When I decided to marry you, when I finally acknowledged the supreme value you are to me, I chose then as I choose every moment I think of you now, to live my life as yours. That you are for me, that you are me, I am certain.

This is the fact of my love for you. This is my pledge of commitment. Surely as the sun drives all life and motivates every molecule, you, as our relationship, are to me the essential force and law of my life. The rational response to such a fact is to recognise and enact it. This I intend to do with you.

And what joy this brings me! Here is a bouquet of thoughts and feelings that emanated from the source of my life I know as you.

**

I am thinking about my commitment to you as one that is made to the best of myself. And I want to develop that commitment even as I develop our relationship which I am committed to.

I must watch myself that I really attend to and work at our relationship as much or more than anything else I do. This is the opportunity of my lifetime to come into my prime by using the discipline of my other self, you, to draw out the best in me.

I want to use you to become more me.

You are my beautiful tool.

When I come to you I pass myself and when I go through you I surpass myself.
We build upon each other, each other.

What we sum is exactly ourselves.

The world is large with us.

You are my mind, naked or clothed with thought.

You are wholly there in every part.

I am equal to more than me with you.

You are my marketplace, the even challenge of equal exchange.

There is nothing of you I want to change. I only want to exchange everything for you and you for everything.

You are happiness engendered, pleasure’s truth.

You apply all the laws of physics into the proof of yourself.

Your every why is a how.

Each star knows what to do with you.

Undeterred, my inertia continues along the straight line of our joy.

When I take you in my arms the world follows and enfolds.

The wonder of it is why it took me so long to act on the obvious with you. You were always there waiting for me to realise what you must have already known that I knew. You were the maturity I had to acknowledge and grow into.

As I nod toward sleep suddenly I see your face nearer than mine could possibly be in any mirror, and it is filled with a smile of shining tenderness, and then you are in my arms and we are awake with the knowledge of life—and it is as if we have just met as I stepped off the world of my habits into sheer time intense with you.

I want to pay particular attention to you as my vision of what is, was and will be. To actually see you fully in all tenses, see your loveliness changing in the time I can be in part responsible for.

You called again yesterday morning, and I woke to a dialogue of joy, our love’s insouciance, a sprig of sunlight, a sheen of spring.

I remember your nipples tutoring the Big Dipper here and the Southern Cross there, pointing to the brilliance of the constellations of meaning, ours, as my penis points too, to be at home in you.

Our joy is contagious. We mirror the future. We are planning our fate together, laughing with it. We hold, easily, our lives in each other’s hands. We are learning what to do with each other.

I am so interested in you, what lies between your past and its future with me, as I summon the moment into a monument of your presence which is my commitment to the furthering of our lives to come, together.

I think, therefore, I love you.

The future—so full of you that it encompasses my past.

I have the sheen of you on the fingertips of my every thought.

The particular you, locus of my effortless love, that clear flow under the bridge of my desire to know the world as us.

Always I have known your touch, the world that aches behind your fingertips asking me to be true to its law, the mutual exchange of life for love.

When I speak your pure name the sun dissolves on my tongue.

When I die I will make my due and it will be you. And what I was will hive in your eyes as the light still coming from that no longer sun now alive as your sight of what is.

The work of my world is the effortless love of you.

Our music as the score of stars tonight, Sirius, Betelgeuse, Polaris, all clearly moving to the law of identity in my mind moving in yours.

Only now as I stand outside myself found in the love of you do I know how little I knew of me.

You are how the world works,
A factual audacity. Fresh
Smile, sunny metaphor of understanding.
Freedom is your comeliness
Which truth uses as your proof.

May this marriage be reality’s mirror,
The apt expression we opt for,
Agape spanning the synaptic gap.
The mind we share is our market
Founded on the economy of care
And your supply demands more than me.

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,
You make me happy when the skies are blue,
So the old song goes that nourished my youth.
Now the song is you. My seed
Turns to your light and death learns the lesson of life.
Finally, I want to see you as you are
For your truth is so beautiful, whether
Particle or wave, reality caught collapsing
Into a choice which I now want to make.

You and I, exchange of joy for joy,
Your light bends around my mind
And between the flow of your thigh and breast
I settle into the universe as my part
Comes into your whole and I play
At being completely me.

The flutter of the small yellow butterfly
Fans the summer in your brown eyes.
You are the fragrance of the future,
Assay of the flash when our flesh meets,
And I love you so, history of the instant,
Beautiful thermodynamic climb of desire,
Life understood as sweet reversal of the Second Law.

That our marriage may become the marketplace of joy.
Freedom is our sovereign State and we obey
The law of identity through each other.
We have found ourselves equal to our exchange,
We trade in love.
You are my vital principle,
And we share the mind emerging from our matter.

May we always attend to each other’s end
As our first means and final meaning.
My Sunshine, my life, my wife soon to be,
I love you so, for the good of our whole.