loving you like this

I don’t know what to do
with loving you
like this,
I don’t know where to put it
when it has nowhere to go. 

Do I bury it deep inside of me,
and hope something else good grows from it?
How might I eradicate it from me,
like a surgeon?
then place it in a jar like a specimen —
but what container could hold it?
when that isn’t what it’s meant for,
I can barely hold it
though it came from me,
up from the dirt and ashes in me
saw your light and reached,
in slow and steady stretches
I never knew this is what loving someone was —
I thought it was always fire,
like the steady flame waiting
found itself in fuel,
and love ravaged and burned,

Though neither is it a flood,
no rush of dense and heavy drink,
filling to the very brim and overflowing,

It isn’t consuming or engulfing,
love comes steadily.
When in the light, basks, and warms,
in microscopic changes,
a slight expansion and synthesis,
so that, one day,
where it wasn’t
now there it is.

though I hold it, it is both mine and yours,
you don’t know it, but I know it tenderly,
you may never know it, but still
it is a gift to have grown and bittersweet sadness to carry,
loving you
like this.