Love: excerpts from a field guide

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Love, they would have us believe, somehow endures regardless of the season. The color merely migrates from blossom to leaf and from leaf to scalloped, over-wintering wing.

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What poets have traditionally celebrated is almost uniformly of a single species. Love when it is young and fresh indeed seems capable of making its own weather: green firmament, endless red moons.

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But love does age, like any living thing. It follows an arc. Sightless canes tap their way into the soil and take root. They become our flexible stunt-doubles; we, their brittle avatars of death.

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Love gives and gives until the tree stands bare and the ground lies thick with blowsy fruit. A doe and her grown fawn creep in at dusk and split them open with their hooves. I have stood outside after dark and listened to the grinding of methodical teeth.

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We draw together less for stimulation than for solace, now. In this damp cold season, the blues can come down, as they say, like showers of rain.

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The lucky chance that lies at the root of happiness seems all the more miraculous in the dwindling daylight hours, which by government edict we may no longer save. We fall back, trusting in the darkness that blurs and finally erases our sharp-edged grief.

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