THE 21st CENTURY TROUBADOUR

1

Were I a troubadour or a trouvere
And loved a woman inaccessible
Through rank or circumstance I'd utilize
My subtlest skill to praise her rarest gifts,
Finding in the frustration of my doom
An opportunity for poems to bloom.

But as a modern man in a free world
I stare across an existential void
At some unknowable Other I would love,
Confounded by a language I mistrust,
And prisoner to my subjectivity;
And so resolve to form in this abyss
An emblem of impossibility
Made possible through love's deep mystery:
A poem by which to banish nothingness.

2.

     My love is a beautiful stranger
        Whose familiar form, whose well-known ways
      Mask a mystery of sunsets

   To love is not to know
      but to wonder
              And to wander among imponderable sunsets
      rose and mauve.

3.  

Lady of the Orphan Angels
And the broken statues
Adrift in the pink penumbra,
Mother of the bright blue, the breathless ones,
Shepherdess in this forsaken valley,
Could I but believe...