There are brief spans of time too small to seem
Capable of holding weight or stay,
Yet sometimes such small intervals redeem
More meaning than a lifetime could convey.
Only later did I come to see
How quietly a few days could prove true,
That what appeared a passing memory
Had changed the shape of all I thought I knew.
For never having known you would surpass
All lesser losses time could ever claim;
Not youth, fading like shadows over grass,
Nor faith grown dim, nor years that feel the same.
No quiet drifting of what once was whole,
No gentle loss the passing seasons send
Could equal what your presence gave my soul
Before those measured days came to an end.
I would not choose the lines that never meet,
Though running side by side through every year;
For parallel devotion, calm and neat,
Is still a love that cannot draw more near.
Nor would I choose the brief and single place
Where paths once cross and quickly separate,
One fleeting point no memory can replace,
Then distance drawn as though it were by fate.
For there are infinities confined
Within the narrow space from naught to one;
Unending forms the smallest bounds can find,
A fractal blooming \'ere the day is done.
Some stretch beyond the reach of any proof,
Too vast for thought or measure to contain;
While others rest beneath a finite roof,
Yet still refuse the ending they sustain.
So let me be the curve that seeks your line,
An asymptote that time cannot undo,
Halving the distance, always, by design,
Yet never claiming what it longs to view.
Not yours to keep, nor mine to fully claim,
Yet constant in the nearness it pursues;
For even distance may remain the same
And still be faithful in the path it chooses.
If this is all the closeness I receive,
Then let it stand, the limit I pursue,
An endless tending I will never leave,
A quiet proof that still returns to you.
For you were never something I could frame
Within the bounds that ordinary lives employ;
A handful of brief days that slowly came
And left behind a measure none destroy.
Something complete though finite in its stay,
A truth no ending fully can subdue;
And so I close the proof in only this one way—
My infinity was you.