After Dinner, After Midnight Poem by Daniel Brick

I limit myself to one glass of wine,
maybe two, of an evening. Remember
the inscription on the Jade Mountain
from ancient China, 'Only one glass
of wine was required to release a poem
from each poet.' But this is a night
of exceptions, most especially our reunion
after all these years foolishly apart,
for no discernible reason, just inertia
and that imperceptible sliding away
from what centrally matters. So let's savor
this second bottle of Sauternes, and
I'll complete my argument: Both in friendship
and in love, we make a choice, 'I choose YOU,
and I trust you will choose ME.' Is that not
the heart's ease to perform? Just one sentence,
two parts, mirror images of each other. How decisive
mind and heart can be when they perform in tandem!
Intelligence and Affection both contributing
to human happiness. This concludes my Symposium Redux.
WHEW! If you were expecting a YES, BUT... statement
tempering this idealism, you won't get it from me.
I erected two pillars, Lover and Beloved, or
Friend and Friend, and yoked them into a unity
with a lintel. And that mental construct is my
contribution to HOPE, that slippery but essential
virtue, that commitment at each day's dawn to build,
and never tear down. Hope is always the Ariadne's Thread
connecting us to time, and fulfillment. 'Something
too much of this' perhaps. Whenever I come to the end
of a philosophical argument, when my words become web-like,
I know it's time for our poems to prevail. THE NEW YORK REVIEW
published one of your gems last month, BRIDGES AND LADDERS.
I'm writing a series of poems I am calling THE GEOGRAPHY
OF LOVE, exploring how place affects lovers, both physical
and psychological places. Already the ones I've written speak
to yours in BRIDGES AND LADDERS. They will lean on the same
book shelf, be read by the same people. They are the twin columns
of freemasonry, Boaz and Jachin, at the place where the Ladder
begins our ascent... Here is the final wine of the evening.