"Move Toward Love" by Gabriel Brunelle

It occurs to me
that I don't know how to love;
I don't know how to love me,
and I don't know how to love you, too.

I am lost
in the dark.
It is such a lonely place in which to be.

Yet now I have this truth,
like a black and garish idol, square-toothed and rectangle-grinning, like a floating compass stone
suddenly unspinning.

Am I really lost,
at the center of a terrible truth? Can there be a terrible truth? Am I really gone,
caught in the darkest spiral?
Is the dark really dark,
inside the golden angle?
And am I really alone
with this new truth, this totem?

The idol is made to gold.
Yes;
once grisly slick and monkey-grinning, the grime now rimes a glow.
The truth
is made
of gold,
and so my time
is spun to gold --
teased,
gathered,
and worsted bright
from the blackness
in my soul.

And so the dark

becomes the light; the cloudy ink illuminates.

Maybe it always could.
Coming from nothing except ourselves, the color is of the mind.

That is what is meant,
when describing the philosopher's stone; the sinker becomes a sponge
when turning lead to gold;
the alchemy is of the mind.

And St. John said,

". . . the truth
shall make you free."

Yet what shall come of me? What shall I become,
now I see
the world anew?

For still I am alone.
Still I can not love me,
and still I can not love you, too.

All this golden truth,
all this painted color,
and still must I move from one place to another.

With sinker turned to compass stone, and spiral turned to mountain slope, to love myself
I must move toward love.

I must trust that movement to be enough;
to be a dream ascension unto itself;

my love for all of us
will be met in that same motion.