On a derelict pier

Stretched out across a derelict pier suspended over a hand hewn  pond the words from "The Country of Marriage" resonated silently across my eyes: "What I am learning to give you is my death to set you free of me, and me from myself into the dark and new light. Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much." For one who has scant understanding of deep water or death these words carry a palatable mysterious tone which try as i might can not bring understanding to the idea.  There stretched out in the silence recalling touches, funerals, and oceans the words were mere abstraction pointing towards and even more nebulous reality my memory is ill prepared to contemplate. Further on in a different poem I read: "...by pain we learn the extremity of love..." There, latent in the words, seemed to be the crux and while my mind could grasp the body could not hold that truth and if understanding is to be full there can be no schism between the two.  I put the pages to rest, letting  the tobacco fall hissing to the murky water recounting all the lessons both taught and learned over twenty eight years... cataloging the practical and theoretical, labor and occupational, social and academic.  As the sun began to set westward over the wetland the deficiency  in my learning  which manifested itself like a spring day absent the songs of birds was what could be called relational (and what should be the most vital learning of all) Welling up in my solitude the absent truth filled me...and that reality spoke of self preservation and self occupation rather than self abnegation and communal occupation.  It does indeed take a lifetime to live a lifetime and if I were a praying man i would petition that it not take a lifetime to learn to love...that at the end of my days love is not the stillborn child of a fruitless legacy.