After Dinner, After Midnight

I limit myself to one glass of wine, maybe two, of an evening. Remember the inscription on the Jade Mountain from ancient China, 'Only one glass of wine was required to release a poem from each poet.' But this is a night of exceptions, most especially our reunion after all these years foolishly apart, for no discernible reason, just inertia and that imperceptible sliding away from what centrally matters. So let's savor this second bottle of Sauternes, and I'll complete my argument: Both in friendship and in love, we make a choice, 'I choose YOU, and I trust you will choose ME.' Is that not the heart's ease to perform? Just one sentence, two parts, mirror images of each other. How decisive mind and heart can be when they perform in tandem! Intelligence and Affection both contributing to human happiness. This concludes my Symposium Redux. WHEW! If you were expecting a YES, BUT... statement tempering this idealism, you won't get it from me. I erected two pillars, Lover and Beloved, or Friend and Friend, and yoked them into a unity with a lintel. And that mental construct is my contribution to HOPE, that slippery but essential virtue, that commitment at each day's dawn to build, and never tear down. Hope is always the Ariadne's Thread connecting us to time, and fulfillment. 'Something too much of this' perhaps. Whenever I come to the end of a philosophical argument, when my words become web-like, I know it's time for our poems to prevail. THE NEW YORK REVIEW published one of your gems last month, BRIDGES AND LADDERS. I'm writing a series of poems I am calling THE GEOGRAPHY OF LOVE, exploring how place affects lovers, both physical and psychological places. Already the ones I've written speak to yours in BRIDGES AND LADDERS. They will lean on the same book shelf, be read by the same people. They are the twin columns of freemasonry, Boaz and Jachin, at the place where the Ladder begins our ascent... Here is the final wine of the evening.