Love is where you look for it

Sage CohenProductive writing4 Comments

It is time for a new way of looking, a new way of seeing. So you take a full-time job after running your own business for 15 years, purchase a used camera that curves right into the palm of your hand, and become a woman on a bus traveling the rain-streaked poetry of Belmont Street into the rumbling belly of downtown.

You are a woman layered: pink coat, criss-crossed in shoulder bags, standing at a strange angle over the perfection of your coffee until you wander out into the dim morning to become the woman squatting on the sidewalk to shoot directly up at the flat soles of shoes dangling so high above their missing feet. Searching the sky of Alder Street, you see the strange angles of context and place.

Sometimes, looking is the path to finding. Sometimes, love was there all along, in the clouds, in the cup, in the mirror. But you had forgotten how to recognize it.

Sometimes, a borrowed lens reteaches you the loveliness of your own soul, such that everything you see is a part of the song: the arched light fixtures, splashing fountains, buildings climbing ambitiously up in their stuccoed flourishes and facades.

You realize you have fallen in love with your ex-husband all over again, and his girlfriend, too, because when the old story wore out, you were left with something deeper and quieter — like the imprint a pencil makes on a pad through the layer of paper that is now gone. The press of it has simplified and expanded you.

There is nothing left but love and sky, framed in the squares of your making. And you understand that poems and stories are like this: love and sky compressed into something that can, for a moment, hold you.

(Borrowed from Hopeful Divorce.)

4 Comments on “Love is where you look for it”

  1. Your writing inspires me! It’s absolutely beautiful, as is the accompanying photos! Thank you for sharing your gifts with the world!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *