That which you want to move doesn’t take orders.

Or, Fig­ures 1–10: notes from con­tin­ued study.

fig.1
Romance doesn’t hap­pen just any­where.
You are its nat­ural habi­tat, a life so won­der­fully con­fined.
Your time lim­ited, your scener­ies small, your sen­tences curbed.
For you, the right words are as good as air travel.

fig.2
Romance is a weed that crops in mem­ory and yields gar­lands.
It is half a heart parad­ing as the whole.
Not deceit, but a gen­er­ous, mag­ni­fied hon­esty.

fig.3
Romance is loaded.
It keeps piles of unguarded forg­eries.
Romance dumped the gold stan­dard and ran off with infla­tion.
It elopes with each new frac­tion of a cent.

fig.4
Romance can tell a story, but never a joke.
It’s a device that invents num­bers then loses count.

fig.5
It learns from arrows.
Thins to a line and hard­ens to a point.
Nar­rows enough to be held and drawn; to pierce.

fig.6
The Art of Let­ting Some­one In is pocked with secrets, so Romance with­holds some­thing, always.
It is a mine­field of dim­ples just below the horizon.

fig.7
Romance abstracts pos­si­bil­ity from the lump in your throat.
It invents, rehearses and refines a future with­out betray­ing intention.

fig.8
It is a most humane har­bin­ger, proph­esy­ing only in pri­vate.
And it serves div­ina­tions like delicacies.

fig.9
Romance needs what is given.
Its power is surprise.

fig.10
It’s a knack.
Draw tomor­row over today, then hook the past and bury it cen­ter: a belt of vaulted earth.