The laboratory
Under our poor microscope of language
Every love the same love, more or less
Only four phenomena to see there:
Curiosity, lust, resolve, tenderness
Spun into an interlinking pattern
Same as every story ever sown
Every day a different combination
Every love a balance all its own
Every rung providing an instruction
What this love will make; what it will do
The form that it will take inside a lifetime
The means that it will use to run us through.
With the tools we have at our disposal
We can only speculate, at most
Whether it will flourish, fail or falter
Whether it will thrill or kill its hosts.
So we measure every love with gloves on
So we study loves we keep in jars
Some of these, seen on the shelves of others
Some, of course, the loves that once were ours
Every gaze its own laboratory
Every ache and flutter, just the same
so that we may properly define it.
Every species must needs have its name.
