GOAT WARS III...

I fell a little out of love today.
My love said it was easier for him
To say “I love you” than it is for me,
And now I find he doesn’t look the same.

I fell first, and despite my fall, my way
Was hedged about with pleasure and the dim
Hope he might soon, might someday, come to see
How his delight must call upon my name.

But, oh! to say it easily, to say
Those words without a struggle: that is grim.
It’s clear now it was never meant to be —
More than a passing heat, a kind of game.

To give my very soul where it’s held cheap
Drives me down, drives me down, and drives me deep.
.

It wasn't all that bad, really, his e-mail. It was just that it came in the wake of a bizarre moment that befell me as I was trying to go to sleep last night:

it suddenly dawned on me that there was going to be a Life After Goat.

Now, I had known this intellectually for ages, from the beginning, really, but it suddenly bore in on me with all the force of revelation, which was awful. It suddenly seemed inescapable. Everything he had said to me while I raved on about what he meant to me suddenly fell into place. It wasn't that he was preparing me for it all to end, preparing me now, for what must inevitably come, which I had seen so clearly myself and refused to believe, to take on board. No, that would be normal. But by showing me what he could and could not consider doing, he was making it impossible to continue once my senses returned. Well, I suppose they may never return... but it seems they must. At some point.

And this on top of all the crazy things that happened last weekend: his crying, my knowing that I wanted to make it all better, holding him, kissing him, singing of my love to him, singing the song my eldest sister taught me so long ago — forty-five years ago — my God:

There is a ship, and she sails the sea,
She's laden deep as deep can be —
But not so deep as this love I'm in —
I know not how, to sink or swim.

It's not only that in a former lifetime, he was a singer. That was bad enough. Like Leo Kottke, who once remarked that the reason he did not sing on his solo albums was that his voice sounded like goose farts, I should know not to sing to anyone who really understands music. It's an oil-and-water, cat-and-dog kind of thing...

I don't understand music, I just love it.
And love, as I have said all too often, does not wait understanding.

Well, he said lovely things in his e-mail. How he loved to watch me sleep. How we couldn't rush things, which was his worry — what the hell does he think I've been up to for four months and more? — because of the distance between us in space.

But it is the distance between us in the understanding of love that strikes a blow at my hope. The more easily you have said those words, the more often you have said those words, the less they mean. And unless they mean almost everything, they mean nothing. How can I survive this?

Or is this just one more ghastly lesson in Looking Glass economics?

Dear God, let this cup pass me by.
But I can taste it already.

And his eyes are so blue. And his face is so ugly/fair.
And I have fallen, so hard, so fast, so completely.
And now... to pick up the pieces, really look the probabilities in the eye.

Can I do it?

Well, they say that God never asks more of us than he has given us strength to handle, but somehow, right at the moment...

I doubt it.
.