How much of love

I found an old file full of things I wrote years ago, back in the days when one used a typewriter and paper. Here is one of them:



How much of love
Can be grown in a field
Of sun-warmed, red tomatoes?
Living, liquid life
Transformed
Into abstractions, rational relations,
Love of men,
Mankind,
Mathematics,
A washed dinner plate.

External things which are only
Phenomenologically true, perhaps, but nonetheless are
Hardly the crystallized works of a dead
Artist’s thought. Or the insubstantial
Hallucination
Of an amazed psychotic.

And then, too, remember that
Undefined warmth that puts sway in the hips,
As real as a tomato patch
And as insistent as the need to sing,
Ripened red by the same sunshine.

In the beginning was hardly the word.
In the beginning
(as always is)
Was the multitude of precious things.