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.