Ode To An Ineffable Affection Poem by Whit Leyenberger

Your things aren’t in the medicine cabinet anymore
Leaving for real this time
Doesn’t matter if I believe you
My silence washing you like an ice bath in public

The last thing I’d hear you say
Before the soft click of the door
Closing and your muffled exit down the stairs was
That all you ever wanted was
To know I loved you
And that you earnestly regretted
That your suffering might be
Displaced by another’s

If I could have told you anything
I would outline the impossibility of this feat
For the very idea of what we might call
My heart only exists because of the way
You filled me day after day with your humbling grace
That my definition of that four letter word was
Forged in the cinders of your bewildering attraction

But I never loved you

For if it was, that I did love you
Then I have always loved you
Before the first sight, before the sound
Of your name echoed through the
Chambers of my heart I knew its voice
I loved you before I loved the rain
Or the stars or holiness
For I would’ve had to have always loved you

Deep within me
At the root of my pulse
This presence has dwelled softly burning
It is my yearning, my will
And anytime I have grown, anytime
A cell within me divides I know
It is only to make room
For the eternity of your laughter
You are the lightness that lets my heart leap
You are my smile lines

Quietly scoured spiritual assets
Trying to find something to
Nourish these waning flickers
But I lacked the reservoirs to sustain you
I’m a little man with big eyes

I have never desired anything
But to crawl inside you and diffuse:
To bit by bit replace my festering
With the blooming miracle of you

And I don’t know what
That is
But it isn’t love
I was always trying to find that word,
The one that would at last release
Me into you

But I couldn’t find it
And it isn’t in the medicine cabinet anymore