Love

Within the last decade since I moved away from California, I sent a card to my father. And I included this poem in it--


The Secret
By Denise Levertov

Two girls discover  
the secret of life  
in a sudden line of  
poetry.

I who don’t know the  
secret wrote  
the line. They  
told me

(through a third person)  
they had found it
but not what it was  
not even

what line it was. No doubt  
by now, more than a week  
later, they have forgotten  
the secret,

the line, the name of  
the poem. I love them  
for finding what  
I can’t find,

and for loving me  
for the line I wrote,  
and for forgetting it  
so that

a thousand times, till death  
finds them, they may  
discover it again, in other  
lines

in other  
happenings. And for  
wanting to know it,  
for

assuming there is  
such a secret, yes,  
for that  
most of all.

Denise Levertov, “The Secret” from O Taste and See: New Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Denise Levertov. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: O Taste and See: New Poems (1964)
--

I came across this poem when I read the book "A General Theory of Love." The book is copyrighted in 2000, two years after I left California.

There is a review of this book by Brad (http://robothink.blogspot.com/2005/09/general-theory-of-love.html)

The paragraph that follows the poem explains why it used this poem to start with:

"Some might think it strange that a book on the psychobiology of love opens with a poem, but the adventure itself demands it. Poetry transpires at the juncture between feeling and understanding - and so does the bulk of emotional life. More than three hundred years ago, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote, The heart has its reasons whereof Reason knows nothing. Pascal was correct, although he could not have known why. Centuries later, we know that the neural systems responsible for emotion and intellect are separate, creating a chasm between them in human minds and lives. The same rift makes the mysteries of love difficult for people to penetrate, despite an earnest desire to do so. Because of the brain's design, emotional life defeats Reason much as a poem does. Both retreat from the approach of explication like a mirage on a summer's day."

My thoughts are disjointed
 but it is profound

I was found
 but was forgotten

I think in sudden lines of poetry--fragmented
 but deep...

Love