Love Handles: Carried Away

What Love Is

They don’t know what love is
They don’t know what love is
They don’t know what love is
I know what love is
—Randy Newman, You Can Leave Your Hat On

It’s an adjective (love story);
it’s a verb (I love you truly;
it’s a noun (my love, I’m sorry,
I’ve not loved you much more duly;
you deserve it); it’s a pity;
it’s my bad, Love; it’s a blame
that’s mine alone, Love; it’s a pretty
mean requital; it’s a shame;
still, it’s emotional attachment;
one strong feeling of attraction,
strong desire to meet its match meant
(you both hope) to lead to action;
something that you cherish, treasure,
worship, hold dear, and care for
so passionately; height of pleasure
you, with all your heart, adore,
Love; something that you headlong fall in,
sucked in by its siren song,
and you’re so headstrong that you’re all in;
and then, when it goes all wrong,
it breaks your heart, it breaks the spell,
and breaks you as it breaks the bout of
what now makes your life pure hell,
a tree-like something you fall out of
—if you’re lucky; like as not
you’re fated to be more the weeper,
since, Love, hopelessly so caught,
you headlong fall in all the deeper.

Well, as usual, I got a little carried away there, I know. But Plato understood:

Every man is a poet when he is in love.

And how can one not be in love, not be a poet, when there are so many objects of love to be in love with? In fact, there are as many objects of love as there are objects in the world, even beyond—the moon, the stars (especially those falling for you), the sun, the planets, even the space between them. Don’t we all love our space—and expect people to respect it? Yet the question that confronted me, in creating this paean to love, was, With so many objects of love, and seemingly as many ways of treating of them (romantic, sincere, satiric, tongue-in-cheek, narrative, nonsense, erotic . . .) how in the world would I handle them? The answer is that I handled each according to how it moved me, meaning sometimes with honeyed words, sometimes with honey-coated thorns, so effective, I’ve found, at pricking love for the pricking. Yet however much I was carried away, I always took pains to handle each with tenderest care. If I hadn’t, could I really call it love?

And now, having totally bared myself, I stand before you, vulnerable, feeling as star Indian Bollywood actress and ravishing object of love Kareena Kapoor Khan felt in Tashan:
Rising out of the sea like a Bond girl in nothing but a green bikini, I had nightmares of how my love handles would be on display for the whole world to see.

My own Love Handles now rising up out of the See! in nothing but a cyber-thin cover (hiding nothing)—on display for the whole world to see—my trembling hope is that, like me, you will tearfully pore upon each as a heart-melting object of love, and be likewise carried away. But even if, in the final ogling,

You don’t know what love is
You don’t know what love is
You don’t know what love is
I know what love is.