Your homecoming will be my homecoming

"...Because limbic resonance and regulation join human minds together in a continuous exchange of influential signals, every brain is a part of a local network that shares information.

...All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of one another's emotional world, at the same time that we are bending their emotional world with ours. Each relationship is a binary star, a burning flux of exchanged force fields, the deep and ancient influences emanating and felt, felt and emanating.

...The limbic transmission of Attractors renders personal identity partially malleable - the specific people to whom we are attached provoke a portion of our everyday neural activity. ... We would scarcely imagine that identity could be as fluid as the seas that the supposed self rides on.

E.E Cummings paints a lover's power to render identity in this way:

your homecoming will be my homecoming -

my selves go with you, only i remain;
a shadow phantom effigy or seeming

(an almost someone always who's noone)

a noone who, till their and your returning,
spends the forever of his loneliness
dreaming their eyes have opened to your morning

feeling their stars have risen through your skies....

Page 142, 'A General Theory of Love', Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., Richard Lannon, M.D.

Then, the smell of woodsmoke

A Separate Time

In the years since I saw you on Sunday,
I left my home and walked out across the earth
with only my occasional luck and knowledge of cards.

I met men and women constantly dissatisfied,
who hadn't learned to close their hands,
who sewed and patched their few words
fashioning garments they hoped to grow into.

There were winters sheltered in a cabin beneath pines.
There were frozen rivers and animals crazy with hunger.

But always I saw myself walking toward you,
as a drop of water touching the earth immediately
turns toward the sea. Tonight I visit your house.

In the time precious to newspapers and clocks,
only a few days have passed. The room is quiet.

Looking into your eyes, I become like the exile
who turns the corner of the last cliff and suddenly
stares down into the valley of his homeland,
sees the terraced fields and white-roofed houses
grouped on the hillside. Then, the smell of woodsmoke
and a woman calling her husband in for the night.

Stephen Dobyns

Poems

It is difficult to get the news from poems
Yet men die miserably day by day
For lack of what is found there.

William Carlos Williams

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower and Other Love Poems: That Greeny Flower