After the First Hunger

I have loved you through the years that changed us,
through summers when desire seemed almost endless,
through winters when age began its work,
and through those long afternoons when memory
would suddenly return your face to me
with such force that everything around me
seemed briefly suspended, as though the world
had forgotten its direction
and left the two of us alone inside a moment
that belonged to only us.

I have loved the way your voice can alter
the whole character of an evening,
how a single word from you can bring back
the man I was when wanting you first began,
before either of us understood what such wanting
could become, before years had given us
the voice required for devotion,
before we understood that love could deepen
while youth moved steadily away from us.

You have become part of my thinking,
part of the way I plan a day,
part of every future I can imagine,
and when I think of happiness I think
of your presence beside mine,
of the ease that comes from having known
one person long enough to see his changes,
his victories, his sorrows, his stubbornness,
his tenderness, and still desire him
with the same hunger that first drew me close.

There have been days when the world
seemed determined to separate us,
days when distance became its own dialect,
days when time appeared to take something
from each of us, little by little,
yet our love continued forward,
carrying what mattered from one year
into the next, refusing to become
a memory of what we once were.

Now I understand that love is larger
than the first trembling discovery,
larger than youth or desire or promise,
because after all these years I can still
look at you and feel that old astonishment,
that sudden certainty that among all
the lives two men might have lived,
ours found each other, and somehow
we kept choosing the same life together.