This poem explores a form of love that exists without possession, conflict, or physical demand. It is based on my personal understanding of a love built on admiration and complete understanding of eachother, a love that remains gentle throughout and uninjured by jealousy and control. Romantic love today is majorly characterized by intense desire, this poem turns toward a rarer kind of connection, a love built on respect rather than longing. What allows it to continue, and what allows it to flourish and bloom, is presence alone; the choice to remain and to value another without asking them to be anything more.
vestige
/ˈvɛstɪdʒ/
noun
a trace or remnant of something that is disappearing or no longer exists.
a trace of a love too pure for this world.
Love refuses habitus.
It arrives before instruction,
a residue the body does not claim
as its own.
Something settles
where direction once rehearsed itself,
a pressure without force,
a weathering without sky.
Neither advance nor retreat,
a stillness that forgets
why movement learned its name.
Most come weighted,
bones calibrated for impact,
palms pressed to the ground
to test its willingness to bruise.
But the ground keeps no ledger.
It does not harden to be heard.
Here, tenderness
is not purchased
by abrasion.
Some glimpse it once,
a cleaning never entered,
and name it vacant,
a vestige mistaken for absence,
they turn away, relieved.
Entry is no step;
it is erosion.
Hands unlearn the reflex to close,
Possesion sheds its grammar.
Beneath hunger,
the field recalls
how to hold with enclosing,
how to remain
without weight
There is no declaration.
No visible rupture.
Only the easing of a subtle recalibration,
a releasing of the surplus,
until nothing resists remaining
Observers grow uneasy.
They hunt for damage,
for a scar to certify belief,
finding none,
they doubt.
They were taught love
as injury that loiters.
They do not recognize
this quiet continuity,
this unbroken persistance,
as candid devotion.
It does not guard.
It diffuses,
becomes climate,
everywhere without perimeter.
Silence moves through it
the way light inhabits water
not entering,
not leaving,
continuing.
There are two.
Between them,
not distance,
but a margin wide enough,
alien to collapse.
A space where nothing is asked
and nothing ever needs
to be taken.
It holds both fully
without them ever becoming one.
We did not arrive by contrast,
but by resemblance,
a similtude older than wanting.
Seldom did I trace the borders of you.
Nothing in me inventories our losses.
What is given does not tremble,
so it is left unguarded.
We stand, vestige beside vestige,
unclaimed,
free from hunger,
without ascent or decline.
It stays.
Staying was never marked,
only what remains
when nothing is taken,
still breathing.
-AT