Love is impractical in the way it continues on completing people,
even when parts of those people are missing, like how an orange
is not quite whole until it is made up of all its individual segments.
I knew a couple once, two men: the first man had been paralyzed
from the waist down; shattered his hip bones and tibia
in a bomb explosion in Iraq. He was informed by the doctor
that he would have to remain in a wheelchair
for the rest of his life.
The second man stayed.
In Japan the cracks of broken objects are mended with gold,
so as to emphasize the ancient belief that when something
has been hurt or damaged, it is all the more beautiful
for what it has been through.
The second man stayed.
I saw them, once, in the hospital at night: the lights off,
buzzing of the ventilator, the neon lifeline dancing its slow jagged waltz
across the dark plane of the monitor.
The second man held his lover in bed on top of the sheets,
curled like a comma around his body, his good legs
folded around his lover’s bad ones, the way in which
a mother bear protects her cubs from hunters.
And the moon, it was reflecting off the sharp curves
of that man’s face; it tapped out a message in Morse code
across the lines of his forehead:
I am not going to leave you.