Time, thou must untangle this, not I. It is too hard a knot for me t’untie.
—Viola, Twelfth Night, Act II Sc. ii, William Shakespeare
Here, love, is my music,
here, my song,
play on, play on,
be sick of me.
And here the ropes
I’ve used to tie
our lives together.
Here the knots
and here the knife
to cut them.
Any anchor
I tether to you,
snap the lines.
Any claim
I make on your body,
your name, erase it.
And let’s meet
again, impossibly free,
as innocent as strangers.
“Let’s [re]start at the very beginning/a very good place to start…”
Ah, yes, the first blush of new beginning, the freshness and wondrous excitement of it….
But what of the sturdiness, the resonance of a history warped and weaved together, the estuary of I and Thou? So far you’ve traveled, and such sights you’ve shared. Do you truly want to return afresh to the starting line? Things’ll likely be so otherwise, this time.
Oh friend, I hear what you mean … There is such richness in the warp and weave. But I wonder what it would be like to be able to meet each other newly, if not in dropping the past, at least in dropping any expectation … Totally unrealistic. We are human. But I wonder …
and, being human, we unexpectedly pull off unrealistic wonders time and again. yes, having history and all-things-new, both, ‘twould be a best of both worlds. may we continue striving without ceasing to make it so.