The pop songs have it wrong.
I did not love you at first sight and,
speaking frankly,
I doubt it happens like that at all.
If it does happen, it happens
like lightning striking a person:
only rarely
and mostly to the outstanding.
No, I love you as a verb —
you know, an action word —
like ‘trying’, as in the sentence,
“I am trying to not get mad at you
for doing the thing I asked you
not to do just a minute ago,”
or like ‘thinking’, as in the sentence,
“I am thinking about how much easier
this would be without you here
messing it up,”
or like ‘praying’, as in the sentence,
“I am praying you never leave
because I love you, I need you,
I’m sorry.”
The books and movies have it wrong too.
Loving you isn’t easy,
it’s hard work, and like most hard work,
there are times I would rather work
somewhere else
because doing so would ask less of me today,
but I have done lots of
easy things in my life, and,
in the completion of which have found
that so few of them are
satisfying
in the way
that the truly difficult things are.
I’ll tell you who has it right:
the elderly.
The couple who first met each other
about the same time that God
got interested in landscaping
and have fought and scrapped for
every inch they’ve taken with each other.
They’ll tell you how hard it is
to fight for those little inches
while still devotedly
miraculously
holding hands.